rmathew.com

Blogspot Blog Imported

2012-03-23T00:00:00+05:30

I have imported into this web-site all the posts from my Blogspot blog (into which I had previously imported the entries from my Advogato diary). I feel it is better to have a single infrequently-updated web-site rather than a couple of such web-sites. It also consolidates into a single web-site most of what I have been polluting the World Wide Web with since the year 2001.

Blogspot allows you to export the entire contents of your blog as a handy XML file. I wrote a small program to transform this XML into appropriately-dated posts in this web-site. The program would have been simple but for the code to handle many of the quirks of the way I used to write the HTML for the Blogspot blog and the Advogato diary, as well as the idiosyncracies of the respective hosting platforms. The end-result should be fairly readable, though possibly not formatted in the most desirable manner.

As an aside, this import from Blogspot into my web-site as well as the previous import from Advogato into Blogspot was fairly straightforward to do using the respective exported dumps and custom programs. It would have been very difficult if these hosting platforms were not liberal enough to make it easy to migrate off them (or if I had not known programming). Kudos to Advogato and Blogspot for being so open.

“Wolf Hall”

2012-03-18T00:00:00+05:30

I felt a strong urge to read “Wolf Hall” by Hilary Mantel when I read her frank article in Intelligent Life on how she perceived awards as an author, in particular the Man Booker Prize that she (deservedly) won for this novel. The book is historical fiction set in the period 1500-1535 and tells the story of the rise of Thomas Cromwell in the court of Henry VIII of England. The relentless pursuit of Anne Boleyn by the king and the resultant set of tumultuous events that led to the English Reformation separating the Church of England from the Roman Catholic Church forms the backdrop for this novel. This book is very well-written and is well worth the time it takes to read it.

If you are somewhat familiar with the history of this period, you wouldn't find much in the plot of the novel since it stays very faithful to the historical record. What is brilliant about this novel is the way it manages to show well-rounded portrayals for most of the characters in the book - their human side - rather than the black and white portrayals that one usually gets to see in retellings of history. Another brilliant aspect of this novel is how it manages to recreate life in 16^th century England, especially the hold of religion, class and epidemics on life and that of men on women. These aspects provide the context for the reader to appreciate the behavior of the folks involved as events unfolded around them. It is quite an achievement on the part of the author to present an interesting story while remaining true to the historical record.

The book is one of those rare pieces of good literature that remains quite accessible throughout, without betraying any condescension towards the lay reader. Even though the book is set in 16^th century England, the characters mercifully speak an English that should be readily understood by most modern speakers of the language. There are no irritating tricks of the narrative, deployment of clever metaphors, use of obscure terms, etc. to distract the reader from enjoying the story. Once again, this restraint on the part of the author to refrain from faux sophistication in her writing is quite commendable in my opinion. I really wish more authors would follow her example.

The narration of the book is from the point of view of Thomas Cromwell (in the third person) and the pronouns “he”, “his”, etc. when used in this book usually refer to Thomas Cromwell. This took me a little while to get used to and was somewhat confusing in some places. It also turns out to be a little clumsy as the author has to clarify who is the subject being referred to by such a pronoun at some places in the book (so the whole point of using a pronoun is lost). This is of course a minor quibble against an otherwise excellent book.

While reading the book, I kept wondering why it was titled “Wolf Hall”, the residence of the Seymour family, where hardly any action takes place - the bulk of the action actually takes place at Austin Friars, the residence of Thomas Cromwell. Towards the end of the book, Thomas Cromwell uses the phrase homo homini lupus (“man is a wolf to man”), which captures the essence of the book and in effect reveals a possible explanation for the title.

It seems that a sequel to this book is in the works. I am eagerly waiting to lay my hands on that book.

“Blink”

2011-09-21T00:00:00+05:30

“Blink” is a book by Malcom Gladwell on rapid cognition, that is, our ability and tendency to take decisions and form opinions in the blink of an eye, without taking the time needed to fully evaluate the matter at hand using all the available evidence. We are usually not conscious of such behavior and cannot normally explain it, if forced to do so. This “thin-slicing” (as the author calls it) helps us a lot in our lives, but we need to be aware of its disadvantages and work towards turning it into an advantage.

There are quite a few and varied anecdotes that the author manages to stuff into this little book to illustrate his points. The breadth of these anecdotes is amazing - I have no idea how the author manages to find so many of them from different fields in support of his points. However anecdotes, being what they are, are hardly conclusive evidence that can prove the author's points. They usually fail to mention or account for another factor that could provide an alternate explanation. In some of the cases, the anecdote in question doesn't even seem to support the author's point (most notably the story of the military war-games between the Red and the Blue teams, where the Red team's behavior appears more deliberate than the author cares to admit), except if you just take his word for it.

In fact there doesn't seem to be much of a point in the book. The author initially seems to argue that we take quite a few decisions in the blink of an eye without much data to support them, which turn out to be the right thing to do. Then the author seems to argue that many a time these decisions and judgements go awfully wrong and we'd really be better off resisting our irrational urges to go with them. Finally the author seems to show that snap decisions work best for experts in their area of expertise or when it is backed by deliberate and sustained practice.

Why does one need a book to tell them this?

In other words, get this book as a light read that tells some interesting stories, but don't expect to get any big insights. As they say here in India, this is a “time-pass” book.

Mauritius

2011-09-05T00:00:00+05:30

A couple of holidays declared in the middle of last week afforded one of those rare opportunities where you apply for just three days' leave and end up with a nine-day vacation. We spent most of this vacation on the beautiful island of Mauritius. Clean beaches with white sand next to a turquoise-blue sea - what more does one need for a perfect vacation? Nothing much, it turns out.

We took a 6-nights/7-days tour-package from TravelGuru for this trip, which included airfare, hotel stay with breakfast and dinner ("half-board"), airport pick-up and drop-off and a basic set of tours. We had to travel via Delhi (at an extra cost) since the direct flights from Bangalore connect with Mauritius during the middle of the week, instead of the weekends, for some weird reason. We stayed at the Jalsa Beach Resort. The tours were organized by Seaside Holidays.

The View From Our Resort

The first shocker for us when we landed in Mauritius was to discover that the Indian Rupee sells for quite a bit less than what is indicated by the official exchange-rate of about 1.66 Indian Rupees for every Mauritian Rupee - the best rate we could actually get was 2 Indian Rupees for a Mauritian Rupee. If you carry US dollars or Euros, you can get rates much closer to the official exchange-rate. Fortunately for us, our credit-cards worked pretty much everywhere, so we didn't have to carry around much cash (even with the slightly higher retail exchange-rate and the 3% service-fee, using a credit-card works out to be cheaper than transacting in cash in this case).

The second, and bigger, shocker for us was to discover how expensive everything was in Mauritius, especially food and drinking water. The rate for a bottle of drinking water was particularly bad at the hotel (75 Mauritian Rupees for a liter of water), so we got a couple of crates of water from a super-market at the first available opportunity. Anoop, one of our drivers, explained it to us once by pointing out that tourism and sugarcane-cultivation were the main sources of income in Mauritius - almost everything else was imported from elsewhere.

Two things we quickly noticed in Mauritius were the ubiquity of sugarcane-fields and the preponderance of people of Indian descent.

It seems as if every square-meter of land that is not covered by a building or a road is devoted to cultivating sugarcane. (Oddly enough, they seem to export almost all of it and then import sugar from South Africa, the one thing you would expect them to not have to import. Even odder was that we could find sugarcane juice to drink at only one place, that too at the exorbitant rate of 100 Mauritian Rupees for a small glass of the stuff.)

Roughly 70-75% of the population seems to be of an Indian origin, descended from the indentured Indian laborers brought over to the country during its occupation by the British.

The people in the country mostly speak Creole and can converse in a heavily-accented English with you (they can also easily talk in French, if you know the language; one of the reasons why it is so popular with French tourists). All the people we met were almost always very polite and courteous. This was especially visible on the roads (which were mostly very well-maintained, if a little narrow in places).

The tours included in our package were the North Tour, the South Tour and the Island Tour. Apart from these, we also opted for an Under-sea Walk, a Blue Submarine Dive and a Catamaran Cruise.

The North Tour comprised visits to places in and around Port Louis, including a big super-market (a surprising stop for a tour, but very useful for buying water, wine, etc.), Aapravasi Ghat, Fort Adelaide (La Citadelle), Marie Reine de la Paix and finally the Le Caudan waterfront. Of these, I found only the Le Caudan waterfront exciting. It was very lively, very clean and quite beautiful.

Le Caudan Waterfront

The South Tour comprised long journeys to mostly "meh" places, except for the beautiful Chamarel Falls. The particularly irritating part of this tour was the stopover for lunch at a restaurant that charged exorbitantly for its passable food, even going by Mauritian standards.

Chamarel Falls

The Island Tour was the best of the included lot. It took us to the beautiful island of Ile aux Cerfs, where you can indulge in a wide range of water-sports or just relax on the beautiful beaches (I found it somewhat amusing that most of us Indians opted for the former, while most of the white folks opted for the latter). This tour was marred a little by intermittent bad weather and by repeated break-downs of a boat that was to be used for some of the water-sports, causing us to waste a lot of time that could otherwise have been spent enjoying this beautiful island.

Beautiful Water

The Under-sea Walk was a unique experience - we actually got to walk on the sea-bed, admire the coral and sea-life there and feed the fish off our hands. The Blue Submarine Dive was promising, but a little underwhelming since we didn't get to see much under-sea life on our visit.

The Catamaran Cruise to Ile aux Gabriel was amazing. It was made thrilling by some high waves on the sea that rocked the boat and several sightings of flying fish. The island itself was beautiful, surrounded by shallow seas where you could wade in quite a bit. I tried snorkeling for the first time in my life and was very excited to find out how long I could remain underwater in this manner and how many intrepid fish I could spot, and almost touch, this way.

On the whole, it was quite a memorable vacation.

(Originally posted on Blogspot.)

“Liar’s Poker”

2011-08-26T00:00:00+05:30

Liar’s Poker is a book by Michael Lewis that describes his time during the late 1980s at Salomon Brothers, a Wall Street investment bank. It also tells the story of the firm itself, especially its hits (with mortgage bonds) and misses (with junk bonds), as it rose to become a mighty power in the financial markets and subsequently fell into disgrace from that position. The book provides an interesting look into the mad, testosterone-filled world of financial traders as it was during a crucial turning point for Wall Street.

The author weaves two narrative threads into the book: his own experience at Salomon Brothers and the story of the rise and fall of Salomon Brothers, peppering these with commentaries on crucial events that shaped the financial markets during the 1980s. The feel of the book changes as the author switches between the two threads - autobiographical in some places, journalistic in others. I found this a little jarring, though the prose remains highly entertaining throughout.

Some of the characters and events described in this book are incredible. These include John Gutfreund, the firm's CEO, Lewis Ranieri, the head of the mortgage department who started off in the mail-room, John Meriwether, the head of the fixed-income arbitrage group and one of the finest bond traders, etc. If you have always cringed at the astonishing paychecks and bonuses given to many traders at Wall Street or if you despise the way they seem to actively misguide their customers to further their own interests, you will find a wealth of material here to support your theses. If you have ever worked in a large organization, you will have much to empathize with in this book.

The author has a knack for simplifying financial jargon and making it accessible to the lay reader. He explains how bonds work, how mortgage bonds are created, what is meant by Collateralized Mortgage Obligation (CMO), what are junk bonds, how traders exploit opportunities for arbitrage, etc. This is crucial as the creation and usage of some of these financial products is central to some of the parts of the narrative. What make the book truly readable though are the author's sense of humor, sharp observational skills and a consistent focus on key people and their interactions.

Read this book to get a good insight into why Wall Street behaves the way it does and why global financial markets have grown so big so fast in the last few decades.

“Khushwant Singh Selects Best Indian Short Stories (Volume 2)”

2011-08-15T00:00:00+05:30

“Khushwant Singh Selects Best Indian Short Stories (Volume 2)” is the second part of a collection of short stories written by various Indian authors and selected by Khushwant Singh. I was looking forward to reading this volume after having read the first volume. Most of the stories in the first volume were of a good quality and I had hoped the same for this volume - unfortunately for me this volume is quite disappointing and the stories vary wildly in quality.

The first six stories in this book are awful in my opinion, even though they they were written by some big-shots (not necessarily in literature though). It's only from the seventh story onwards (“An Accident” by R. K. Laxman) that things start looking up for this book, though they again start to scrape the bottom by the end of the book. I'm a little befuddled by the vast difference in overall quality between the two books, since the stories have ostensibly been selected by the same person for the same collection of which these two books are the constituent parts. Perhaps the publisher should have just published a single volume of great stories, saving readers some money as well as saving a lot of trees.

As with the first book, the stories in this book are short enough to be completed in a single sitting and do not, mercifully, represent obtuse high literature. This makes the book ideal to be picked up during a short break or for a little unwinding, for example. The stories represent a fair cross-section of authors from across the country, including Manohar Malgonkar, Saadat Hasan Manto, Mohan Rakesh, Khushwant Singh, Bhisham Sahni, etc. As is to be expected, some of the flavor of the original language for a story is lost in the translation to English (at least for the stories in Hindi or Urdu), but thankfully much of the original character is retained.

If you have read the first volume, keep your expectations low for this one and you won't be disappointed. If you haven't read the first volume, go ahead and read it - it is well worth the little time and effort you will put into it; this one, I'm afraid not so much.

Just Books

2011-08-15T00:00:00+05:30

A few years ago, I had complained about the lack of a well-stocked and accessible library in Bangalore. To a certain extent this complaint has been addressed since by the quick rise of Just Books in the city. Just Books has a rapidly-growing chain of lending libraries here in Bangalore (and in some other cities in India). The collection of books is decent enough and the lending-rates fair enough for this to be an attractive option for most book-lovers in the city.

There are over 20 branches of the library in Bangalore city alone, making it extremely accessible wherever in the city you happen to be, the infamous traffic-congestion in the city notwithstanding. It's open over the weekend from morning to night, making it quite convenient for working folks like yours truly. There are different plans to suit different needs - for example, on the basic plan you pay a fixed amount per month and can then borrow two books at a time, keeping them as long as you want; on the highest plan you can keep four books and two magazines at a time. Instead of being limited by the collection of a single branch, you can request books from any of the other branches in the city (they claim to have over 300,000 books across these branches). You can borrow a book from any of the branches in a city; ditto for returning it. There is also a regular newsletter published by the library and distributed freely among members that features, among other things, book-reviews and letters by members, some coverage of literary events in the city, interviews with authors, etc.

I have been a satisfied member for a little over a year (and have no affiliations with them otherwise). I have certainly started to read more books and more regularly as a result of my membership. (Since the monthly-rates are fixed, the longer you keep a book with you, the more expensive it becomes for you - you therefore tend to finish a book as soon as it is convenient for you and move on to the next one.) Most importantly it has saved me quite a bit of money and shelf-space that would otherwise have been spent on stocking these books.

The collection of books is heavily loaded in favor of popular and classic fiction and non-fiction. You will not find academic or technical books here, nor are you likely to find books on eclectic or esoteric subjects - for these, you will have to either visit a well-funded university library or the British Council Library. It is still quite a useful collection to have access to, since it is precisely such books that you usually want to read once but not necessarily keep after reading.

There was some alarming talk of weeding out unpopular books from the library, though better sense seems to have prevailed in the end. This was no doubt to "optimize" the return on their inventory, but what they don't seem to realize is that for a lot of people there is a list of "must-read" books that they try to finish first upon joining a library. This would make popular books seem even more popular and worthwhile to keep in a young library. After you have plowed through all or most of your must-read books, you tend to look for other interesting, possibly not-so-popular books - this is where a well-stocked library offers the chance of a serendipitous find and thus maximal value to the reader.

Unlike books, borrowed magazines have to be returned within a week - if you don't return it within this period, they will actually send you a reminder and/or call you, especially if it is a recent issue. Since it is not always possible for me to finish reading a magazine within a week, this has been a continuing albeit minor irritant. On the flip side, I have also seen the effect of not strictly enforcing this rule - for most magazines, you'd be hard-pressed to find a single recent issue - just increasing the number of copies of each issue is not that viable a solution as they tend to have very short shelf-lives.

In short, Just Books is for you if you are in Bangalore and you want to read books that are perennial classics or recent best-sellers in fiction and non-fiction, without having to shell out the money to buy them all and provide the space to stock them. In theory, it is also good for reading through a bunch of different magazines, though not quite so in practice. All in all, a very good thing to have around for book-lovers in the city.

(Originally posted on Blogspot.)

“Beautiful Thing”

2011-06-30T00:00:00+05:30

“Beautiful Thing” is a poignant book by Sonia Faleiro on the lives of bar-dancers in Mumbai, based on research done by the author over a period of five years. The book tells the story of Leela, a beautiful nineteen year old girl who works as a dancer in a dance-bar in Mumbai called “Night Lovers”. It traces her life as a much-exploited young teenager from Meerut who manages to escape from her home only to become a bar-dancer in Mumbai. There she earns good money, achieves independence and is fussed over by a steady stream of men.

The book is brutally frank and surprisingly intimate, a result of the author being close to her subject and winning her confidence, having followed her subject almost everywhere and having directly interacted with her friends, customers and what passed for her family. Only a woman could have done justice to this subject and it shows in the empathetic tone of the narrative. At the same time, it was remarkably courageous of a woman to spend time in dance-bars, in brothels, in seedy lodges, in the company of petty criminals and not-so-petty ones, with lecherous customers of the girls, etc.

Even though the book is a work of non-fiction, it has a narrative and a cast of characters that rival those in good fiction - it even has a cliff-hanger of an ending, where we are left wondering what becomes of Leela who has taken a big leap of faith. There is beautiful and young Leela who is at the peak of her profession as a bar-dancer at the beginning of the book and has a steady relationship with the (married) owner of the dance-bar. There is the extremely beautiful and somewhat-narcissistic Priya who is Leela's best friend and a bar-dancer as well. There is Leela's submissive mother Apsara who decides to move in with her, much to her irritation. There is Leela's abusive and drunk father Manohar, who regularly beats his wife and in an instance of spite gets the police to repeatedly rape his barely-teenaged daughter. There is Leela's adopted mother Masti who presents the rare case of a eunuch accepted by her family. And so on. The epigraph for the book, quoting Leela, aptly reads:

“My story is the best you will ever hear. The best, understand? Now come close. Closer! Okay, ready?”

There are some minor irritants in book that are a bit distracting. For example, reading “non-wedge” and “kushtomer” looks authentic and amusing once or twice, but not so repeatedly throughout the book. The author has a certain fascination for naming brands that seems superfluous in the text at best and irritating at worst - we are told again and again about the Gold Flake cigarettes that Leela smokes and the LG refrigerator she keeps her rotting vegetables in.

That aside, this is one of those books that make you feel sad or angry at one time and laugh out at another. It makes you contrast your ensconced life and good luck, your relatively petty problems notwithstanding, with that of those far less fortunate, caught in the grip of circumstances beyond their control and living with a constant hope for a better tomorrow. It is in other words a thought-provoking and insightful book that is a must-read. It is arguably one of the best non-fiction books to have come out of India in recent times.

“Confessions of an Economic Hit Man”

2011-06-04T00:00:00+05:30

“Confessions of an Economic Hit Man” is a book by John Perkins describing his work as a purported economist for a large engineering firm (MAIN) that allegedly colluded with politicians and other such firms to spread America's hegemony as an economic super-power. This was done in part by convincing corrupt political leaders in poor countries to take on onerous loans from the World Bank and other such institutions in the name of development and extracting concessions for the business of American companies in such countries when their loans became difficult to service for them.

The author defines the term “Economic Hit Man” as follows:

Economic hit men (EHMs) are highly-paid professionals who cheat countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars. They funnel money from the World Bank, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and other foreign “aid” organizations into the coffers of huge corporations and the pockets of a few wealthy families who control the planet's natural resources. Their tools included fraudulent financial reports, rigged elections, payoffs, extortion, sex, and murder. They play a game as old as empire, but one that has taken on new and terrifying dimensions during this time of globalization.

According to the author, the goal of such economic hit men is to further the global empire of corporations, banks and governments (collectively called “corporatocray” by the author, an unwieldy term that he insists on using throughout the book). If a political leader they target turns out to be incorruptible or not pliable, the “jackals” (CIA operatives) are sent in to assassinate them and replace them with a puppet leader, who very often turns out to be a despot. These operations were carried out in all countries that could help further American business interests - from countries in Central and Latin America, to the Middle East and to the Far East.

If a country did not need foreign aid, for example an oil-rich country like Saudi Arabia, America would still convince its leaders to give business to its firms in the name of modernization of the country. Thus money spent on a country, and much more, would eventually come back to America as business profits, whether the money was originally spent on loans to the country or as payments for oil. In recent times with countries like China that export a lot to America, the money still finds its way back to America as China purchases large amounts of American Treasury securities. It helps tremendously that the American dollar is the international reserve currency, since it does not get hit by a country defaulting on a loan or its own obligations on its loans - it can simply print more money to take care of these situations.

The problem with this book is that there is nothing startlingly-new that hasn't long been suspected by people upset by the American hegemony of recent times. For those that aren't, there isn't any concrete evidence in the book to convince them otherwise. You are thus most likely to hold the same viewpoint about American business interests as you held before reading this book. The author claims to have written a draft of this book in the early 1980s, but held back from publishing it because of threats and bribes. Now that it has finally been published, it does not contain any revelations that people haven't already been exposed to elsewhere, even in main-stream media outlets like The New York Times. It just seems like a lame attempt on part of the author to redeem the wrongs of the early part of his career by portraying his supposed constant struggle with his conscience during this period and his renunciation of this career-path thereafter.

This doesn't mean that there's no food for thought in this book. The generally-accepted business wisdom of pursuing growth for its own sake without more than a superficial regard for the depletion of natural resources and the impoverishment of millions of people, all for the sake of continually increasing business profits, must be challenged. The abuse of the power vested in a country by virtue of being the sole issuer of the only international reserve currency is something that needs to be checked.

“Following Fish”

2011-05-09T00:00:00+05:30

“Following Fish” by Samanth Subramanian is one of those rare English books published from India that are not banal attempts at aping the success of the last block-buster book or lame attempts at becoming a “published author”. It is a travelogue and a food-guide that is very well-written and has also been very well-received, hopefully encouraging others to write good non-fiction books of their own.

The book is a collection of nine essays that describe the author's travels through the coast of India in pursuit of the ways in which fish are caught and prepared, as well as the lives of the people who catch the fish. He travels to West Bengal, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Karnataka, Goa, Maharashtra and Gujarat in his quest, each of which features in an essay (except for Goa, which features in two). The author puts life into these essays by displaying a keen eye for details, a great sense of humor and a flair for the English language. He seems to have charmingly few hang-ups that allow him to get close to his subjects without alienating them.

The essays are wide-ranging in the topics they cover, but are all related in one way or the other to fish. These include the preparation of the famed hilsa (or ilish) in Kolkata, the purported cure for asthma that is delivered by shoving a live medicine-carrying fish down patients' throats in Hyderabad, the toddy shops of Kerala, the pursuit of the sailfish, one of the fastest fish in the oceans, somewhere near Goa and boat-building in Gujarat. Each essay is largely self-contained and with a distinctive feel of its own, making it easy to savor this book in easily-digestible pieces.

It is not very clear just why the author sets out on these journeys, especially since he seems to have taken a dislike to eating fish as a young boy coming from a vegetarian family, but he does show a remarkable passion for his mission and an amazing perseverance. He has a curious penchant for noting brand names (a Mirinda bottle holding oil for a church's lamps, empty Servo bottles used as flotation devices, etc.). I was mildly disappointed that the author does not mention having tasted matthi (sardine) in Kerala, especially since most of the people who have tasted it seem to fall in love with it as far as I have seen, despite its abundance of slender bones that are hard to separate from its flesh. Finally it would be nice to have a list of fish mentioned in the book along with their local names and a sketch or a photograph, for people who are not well-versed in the different types of fish commonly eaten in our country.

Even if you have never tasted fish, these essays make for very interesting reads since they are as much about people and places as about fish. If you love fish, then you owe it to yourself to read this fantastic little book that has just under 170 pages in all.

“Peter Colaco’s Bangalore”

2011-04-25T00:00:00+05:30

“Peter Colaco’s Bangalore” is little book containing several light essays and entertaining anecdotes about Bangalore by Peter Colaco. The book is richly illustrated with water-color sketches by Paul Fernandes (who has created great posters like “Bang, Bang, Bangalore” and the “Shine Boards” series). The book contains “a century of tales from City and Cantonment”, told many a time using the stories of members of the P. G. D’Souza clan, of which the author represents the third generation.

The book dwells a little on the history of Bangalore before presenting little anecdotes and commentary on the evolution of the city. In particular, it talks about the genesis of the very-apparent cultural split of the city into the conservative and somewhat-homogenous “City” areas (Malleswaram, Basavangudi, Jayanagar, etc.) and the liberal and fairly-cosmopolitan “Cantonment” areas (M. G. Road, Lavelle Road, Richmond Town, etc.). Being a man from the Cantonment areas himself, the author talks a lot more about the the Cantonment areas than the City areas. This still leaves the book with lots of entertaining material though and some great insights into why the city has turned out the way it has.

Almost everything that you would expect from a book of this nature is there. For example, the book talks about how large areas of Bangalore came to be occupied by the army, why so many old houses in the Cantonment areas have distinctive “monkey-tops”, why there is such a pronounced influence of English culture compared to other cities in India, how the city came to have so many tanks (and lost so many of them in recent times), etc.

The text doesn't feel dry at all due to the wit and humor of the author. While the author reminisces wistfully about the charm and accessibility of old Bangalore, he is not too bitter about how Bangalore has turned out (except of course for the chronic traffic-congestion and the lack of infrastructure that make it difficult to get from one place in the city to another, which are the pet peeves of everyone here any way). His enthusiasm for the current generation is a welcome relief from the usual grumbling and despair of the people of his generation.

This book doesn't seem to have an ISBN and is very difficult to buy on-line. Even in regular brick-and-mortar shops, it's a little difficult to come by this book. Maybe it's because only people from Bangalore or living here might find this book interesting or maybe it's because this book is probably self-published with a limited number of printed copies.

Unfortunately the lack of editorial oversight shows through - there are quite a few spelling-mistakes, repeated words, spacing-issues and other typographical errors. Many paragraphs are too short and somewhat disconnected from those nearby, leading to an incoherent narrative in places. There are some annoying repetitions - for example, I encountered the sentence “I was born in Bangalore in 1945, the sixth of a family of seven” in at least four different places. I also found the reluctance of the author to spell out relatively-harmless words (“d-mn”, “b-st-rd”) rather amusing.

One notable omission was any commentary on the emergence of newer, more-amorphous areas of Bangalore like Indiranagar, Koramangala, B. T. M. Layout, etc. These are even more cosmopolitan than the Cantonment areas and have changed the character of the city, being home to a large proportion of the “floating population” in the city.

If you have lived in Bangalore for a while, you will very likely find this book quite interesting and fairly insightful. That is, of course, provided you're able to lay your hands on it.

“The Visual Display of Quantitative Information”

2011-04-17T00:00:00+05:30

“The Visual Display of Quantitative Information” is Edward Tufte's classic book on the principles behind creating effective data graphics. This is the area where graphic design and statistics meet to present a lot of information in a manner that readily provides viewers valuable insights, without them having to wade through and analyze a swarm of numbers. Charts, graphs and other visualizations of data fall into this category. With the vast amount of data created these days, effective analyses of these data using statistics and digestible presentation of these analyses using graphics become very important.

The book is divided into two parts: the first part gives an overview of the current and historical practice of creating data graphics, while the second provides principles for creating good data graphics. The sample provided in the first part include examples of good data graphics from real publications, including the works of William Playfair and the remarkable flow-map of Charles Joseph Minard showing the disastrous march of Napoleon's army across Russia in 1812, as well as examples of bad data graphics. There is also some analysis of the possible reasons why several reputable publications produce bad data graphics. These reasons include considering statistics as boring for the lay reader, using people with (only) creative arts backgrounds to create data graphics, trying to make graphics look pretty rather than accurate, etc.

The second part of the book presents a theory of data graphics. This includes the definition of terms like “data-ink” (ink directly used to represent data), “chartjunk” (decorative elements of data graphics that do not directly present data) and “data-density” (the amount of data presented per square inch) and principles for creating effective data graphics. These principles include maximization of data-ink, minimization of chartjunk, increasing of data-density, etc. Once again there are several examples from real publications presented to illustrate these principles.

The central idea of the book is to show how to achieve graphical excellence:

“Graphical excellence is that which gives to the viewer the greatest number of ideas in the shortest time with the least ink in the smallest space.”

This leads to a minimal, straightforward and data-intense style that might not go down well with some people (just like the prose of Ernst Hemingway). It nevertheless forces you to think about a subject that is usually considered as just putting a pretty picture instead of lots of numbers in order to not intimidate viewers.

The great thing about this book is that it practises what it preaches - the chapters of the book are short and to the point and the text is lucid. The book itself is relatively slim at about 200 pages of richly-illustrated and nicely-typeset text printed on non-glossy paper. (The author co-designed and self-published the book because he was dissatisfied with the approach of traditional publishers.)

There is a brochure that comes with the book promoting all the works of Edward Tufte, including other books, posters, classes, sculptures, etc. One quibble I have with this brochure is that it was not at all clear to me how his books are different from each other going just by the blurb presented here for each one. This was a little ironical accompanying a book that promotes clear and concise communication.

Almost all of us, at some point or the other, need to present data to others using graphics. This is not the book for you if you are looking for instructions on which type of graphic to use for presenting a given type of data. Once you have picked the graphic though, the principles presented in this book can help you maximize the effect of such graphics in clearly communicating your ideas to your target viewers.

“Benaami”

2011-04-05T00:00:00+05:30

I picked up “Benaami”, a debut novel by Anish Sarkar, despite having read a brutal review by Rrishi Raote in Business Standard because the author happens to be a friend of a good friend. There are many positive reviews of the book for sure (e.g. this one or this one), but I'm afraid I'll have to side with Rrishi on this one.

The plot revolves around Arjun Chatterjee, who has recurring flashes from his previous birth about 150 years ago when he was Kartik, the founder of a secret society named Benaami (“nameless” in Hindi) that set out to drive the East India Company out of India with the revolt of 1857. He takes the help of Sheila Guha, a professor of history, to get more details of this society and of his own past life. A crazy billionaire named Ratikant Gupta wants to eliminate them and use the brahmastra (“ultimate weapon”) of the secret society for his own nefarious purpose of overthrowing the government.

There are two threads of narration in the book - one following Arjun in modern times and the other following Kartik in the mid-nineteenth century, the latter appearing in italics just in case the inattentive reader gets confused. These narratives almost always appear in different chapters to make it even simpler. The chapters themselves are very short and are further divided into little sections, perhaps to cater to easily-distracted readers. Some times the chapters end abruptly, only for the narrative to pick up from where it left off in the very next chapter.

The narrative itself is in third person and a little too direct and simple. This made reading the book feel a little awkward for me and I just couldn't shake off the nagging thought that the writing could have been a whole lot better. As someone once put it, it is the difference between writing “She left the room in anger” and “She slammed the door shut behind her” - both convey the same meaning, but the latter engages the imagination of the reader just a little bit more to make it more interesting to read.

There are also some bizarre details thrown in (as in novels by Dan Brown) that do not, as far as I can tell, add in any way to the story. For example, how is it relevant that Arjun worked on an IBM ThinkPad (not a Sony Vaio) or drives a Honda City (not a Hyundai Accent) or was being chased in a Tata Sumo (not a Mahindra Scorpio)? Are these awkward attempts at product-placements? Then there is the whole thing about Arjun being an IIT graduate and a software engineer that sheds absolutely no light on his character for the purpose of the story. (Incidentally the blurb on the cover of the book mentions that the author is an IIT-IIM graduate working in Capgemini - why is this relevant to his credentials as an author and why do the publishers think this would make someone want to read this book?)

This is supposed to be a thriller, but the suspense is mostly imagined - the plot plays out in a highly-predictable manner and there are times when you want to hit the characters with a giant clue-bat for being so slow. It feels more like watching a bad film than reading a good book.

On the other hand, this book is just one of the many “easy-reads” being published these days in India, where literary merit gives way to a more marketable formula based on tried and tested plot-lines. So it might well succeed for the publisher and the author despite all these shortcomings.

“Superfreakonomics”

2011-03-26T00:00:00+05:30

“Superfreakonomics” by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner is a sequel to their successful book Freakonomics. Like that book, this one too uses some of the principles from economics to answer a number of questions pertaining to our lives. If you enjoyed that book, this book is more of the same, though much less interesting in my honest opinion. Of course, this could well be due to the number of books that have been published since the original book came out and that explore very similar topics.

Some of the chapters have intriguing titles like “How is a street prostitute like a department-store Santa?” or “Why should suicide-bombers buy life-insurance?” and manage fairly well to apply data and economic principles to justify their conclusions. Unlike the first book however, none of the results presented here are startling enough. The effect is like reading a second-rate story where you can predict pretty well the plot-twists that the writer has in store for you. This is not to say that the results are not insightful, just that they are not that surprising.

If you have read The Tipping Point, the chapter on apathy and altruism (eventually) provides a very different view of the Kitty Genovese murder. The chapter on global warming is already quite controversial (see, for example, Why Everything in Superfreakonomics About Global Warming Is Wrong). That chapter also goes overboard by being a little too gaga about Intellectual Ventures, a company known as a patent troll in many a quarter.

Some of the use of statistics in this book is decidedly dodgy and that gives me an uncomfortable feel about it. It reminds me of Felix Salmon's review of the preceding book. For example, they conclude that drunk-driving is safer than drunk-walking based on the reported rates of deaths for each mile traveled (see their explanation). This not only has the obvious problem that drunk drivers also endanger others while drunk walkers usually endanger only themselves, but it also seems to gloss over the fact that these are usually not comparable choices, except when the distances are very short. (To be fair, they recommend taking a cab over drunk-driving, with which I can agree whole-heartedly.)

As another example, they note that one of the ways to boost your longevity is to get a Nobel prize if you can, since prize-winners have been observed to live very long. A much simpler explanation for the longevity of Nobel-prize-winners could be that since these prizes are not awarded posthumously and are only awarded for innovations that have “stood the test of time” (translating into a gap of 20 years or more between the innovation and the prize), only those who live long enough usually manage to get this prize.

On the whole, this is a mildly interesting book that is worth a read, but only if you critically think through the material in each chapter and supplement it with alternative viewpoints from around the web. The authors should also stop writing any more books in this series.

“The Ode Less Travelled”

2011-03-03T00:00:00+05:30

“The Ode Less Travelled” by Stephen Fry is a book that attempts to teach you how to write poetry. He introduces the reader to variations of metre, rhyme and form in poetry and tries to dispel the myth that in poetry these days “anything goes”. Even if you never plan to write poetry, this is a good book to read as it illustrates the various techniques and constraints that poets work with and will very likely make you appreciate poetry more. If you do write poetry, or plan to, this is an indispensible book.

The very opening lines of this book are a delight, holding the promise of a very interesting read ahead:

I have a dark and dreadful secret. I write poetry.

The book is written in a charmingly non-condescending and honest tone. The prose sparkles at times with a wit that makes this an enjoyable read. Right at the start the author tells you that you must practise every step of the way in order to benefit from this book. He introduces the three golden rules for making the book work for you, at least two of which apply to reading poetry as well:

Savour a poem - read it as slowly as possible, re-reading it to feel its rhythm, balance and shape. If you can, read it out loud.
Don't be afraid - do not worry about “meaning” while reading a poem. Most of the times the meaning will emerge at its own pace.
Keep a notebook - be ready to write out (not type) a line or a poem as inspiration strikes you or as you play with words and techniques in your free time.

He presents these rules as the “End User Licence Agreement” for reading the book and insists that you agree to them before proceeding with reading the rest of the book.

The book is divided into four chapters dealing with metre, rhyme, form and diction respectively. The one on metre is the longest, which is somewhat understandable as it is the defining characteristic of traditional English verse. (It does get a little tedious at times to be honest though.) This chapter starts off by explaining how the accentuated manner of speaking by native English speakers gives rise to the metre or rhythm of verse. This is especially important to understand for non-native speakers of English whose native languages are unaccented (as is the case for us Indians). The chapter describes all sorts of metre that are found in English verse, providing the technical name (invariably Greek) for each variant and several examples from the poems of famous and not-so-famous poets.

The chapters on rhyme and form similarly show the respective variants using several examples. A nice touch by the author is the liberal use of a poem to describe a variant of rhyme or form that is itself written in that form. The author not only shows examples of good use of poetic techniques, but also several examples of bad use of poetic technique, sometimes by very famous poets like Wordsworth. Poetic forms shown here include not just the ones found in English, but also “exotic” forms like Haiku and Ghazal. Haiku in particular seems to be quite popular as a form for English poems on the Internet, but the author shows how in its native Japanese it does not quite have the commonly-believed 5-7-5 syllabic form and how it is not just about counting syllables.

The last chapter on diction and the current state of poetry is one where taste and talent understandably matter much more than for the ones on metre, rhyme and form. The author tries bravely to explain why the diction in the phrase:

...the sea-shouldering whale.

from Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser enraptured the young Keats or why:

And Madeline asleep in the lap of legends old.

from The Eve of Saint Agnes by Keats in turn made the author fall in love with poetry. As he admits, it is largely inexplicable how the diction in a sentence or phrase works for some and doesn't for others. I can relate to this feeling as I have sometimes struggled to explain what is so great about:

...I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe.

from The Stranger by Albert Camus, which is from a novel and which retains its power even after translation into English.

The evocative power of diction in poetry, while subject to the restrictions of metre, rhyme and form, is what makes poetry magical for the author (and for me). He particularly derides the “anything goes” style of budding poets these days who don't want to be constrained by metre, rhyme or form and just want to express themselves, irrespective of whether that expression is enjoyable for, or even makes sense to, their readers. He cautions that you need a great mastery of poetry to be able to write effective free verse, without which you just end up with an inglorious mess.

I wish this book were available several decades ago, so that I could read it as a young boy. I wish someone writes similar books for Urdu and Hindi poetry as well (there have been some amazing lines written in Urdu verse in the last 170 years or so). The way poetry was taught and asked about in school nearly killed it for me (and I suspect for many, many other people) and made me skip poems wherever possible. Such a shame. I was thankfully able to overcome this handicap over time, though free verse still makes me gloss over it most of the time.

Monitor Woes

2011-02-07T00:00:00+05:30

I decided to finally replace the ageing CRT monitor of my desktop PC, after having repeatedly put it off over the last few years. This CRT monitor, a 17" Samsung Samtron 75E, had served me remarkably well for over 11 years. When its display started to blur and intermittently turn yellow (cured by a hard whack on its side), despite a couple of repairs that seemed to initially fix the issues, I knew it was time to say good-bye to it. Since it is nearly impossible to buy a CRT monitor these days, I set out to buy an LCD monitor. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be an affordable LCD monitor good enough to replace my old CRT monitor and I had to ultimately settle for a less-than-perfect replacement LCD monitor.

LCD monitors are an instance of technological progress giving us something that isn't better than what it replaces (CRT monitors) in all aspects and yet that has won because most people just don't care. (Solid-state drives seem to be doing the same to hard-disc drives.) They will no doubt eventually improve and the improvements will surely become affordable over time, but in the interim we are left with something that isn't a perfect replacement and that is a disappointment for those of us who do care.

I like LCD monitors for their slim profiles and light weight compared to CRT monitors. I like them for their pixel-perfect displays, greater viewing-area for the same diagonal-size and generally lower power-consumption. Their DVI-D and other digital input ports allow for more accurate display of images compared to analogue VGA input ports in CRT monitors. However I don't like the bad colour-reproduction capabilities of the affordable LCD monitors based on Twisted Nematic (TN) panels and the quite noticeable degradation in display-quality as you look at them from a little to the side or above (i.e. not perfectly orthogonal to the plane of the panel). LCD monitors based on In Plane Switching (IPS) panels seem to be much better at colour-reproduction, but are not quite affordable yet. (If you want to know more about the technology behind LCD panels, read the excellent articles on this topic available from TFT Central.) I particularly do not like the red-blue colour-bleeding that I see when sub-pixel hinting of text (known as ClearType in the Windows world) is enabled with LCD monitors, whether it is Windows or Linux.

Another disturbing development is the near-universal trend towards bigger wide-screen monitors, that too with a 16:9 aspect-ratio and a "Full HD" resolution of 1920x1080, coupled with decreasing pixels-per-inch (PPI) as the same or lower resolution is spread over a greater display-area. This trend truly baffles me - it is as if all that people do (or seem to care about) on their computers is watch films. A 16:9 aspect-ratio is too narrow for almost every other purpose, be it browsing the web or writing document or reading e-mails. For a given diagonal-size, this aspect-ratio provides the least viewable area among the commonly-seen aspect-ratios (calculate it yourself if you don't believe me). Seen another way it provides the least vertical space for a given horizontal size of the display area. For example, given a horizontal resolution of 1280 pixels, you get a vertical resolution of 1024 with 5:4, 960 with 4:3, 800 with 16:10, 768 with 5:3 and 720 with 16:9. I personally prefer 4:3, though I admit that 16:10 is useful in some coding and system-administration scenarios. The decreased PPI makes text less sharp and therefore more tedious to read.

I set out to buy an affordable 17" LCD monitor with a 4:3 or 5:4 aspect-ratio (known among the vendors here as a "square" monitor), a DVI-D port for video-input and a decent PPI. This turned out to be surprisingly difficult and a frustrating exercise spread over three weeks. Despite the claims on vendors' web-sites, when it comes to affordable LCD monitors the vendors in Bangalore seem to only have 16:9 aspect-ratio monitors, that too with only VGA input ports. 17" seems to be a thing of the past. Only Dell India seems to still sell a 5:4 aspect-ratio 19" LCD monitor (the Dell P190S) that meets my criteria, though I would have preferred its now-discontinued 17" brother, the Dell P170S, which provides the same resolution in a smaller display-area and therefore a slightly higher PPI.

So this is the monitor that I ended up buying. It claims to be able to show 16.7 million colours, though I find the colour-reproduction less than satisfactory (but not very bad) when compared to my Samsung Samtron 75E. The picture is as sharp as I expected and the monitor frees up a lot of space on my desk. I was able to find a vendor willing to buy my old CRT monitor for a small price, freeing me from the worry of disposing it off.

This LCD monitor would do until the time technology makes better monitors more affordable.

(Originally posted on Blogspot.)

“Khushwant Singh Selects Best Indian Short Stories (Volume 1)”

2011-01-06T00:00:00+05:30

As its name implies, “Khushwant Singh Selects Best Indian Short Stories (Volume 1)” is the first part of a collection of short stories written by various Indian authors and selected by Khushwant Singh, an eminent writer and a former editor of The Illustrated Weekly of India. These stories were originally published in English, Hindi, Urdu and other regional Indian languages and have been translated into English where necessary for inclusion in this book. Most of the stories collected here are fairly short and are fairly good, making this book an ideal read for short and long breaks alike.

In the introduction to the book, the editor notes:

[The Indian short story] sticks to the traditional rules of the craft. It is in fact short and not a novella or an abridged novel. It revolves round one or at the most two or three characters and does not have a long list of dramatis personae as in novels. It is limited in time and space and does not span decades or spread out in different locales. [...] It has a distinct beginning, a build-up and usually a dramatic end, frequently an unexpected one which sums up the story. Western short stories tend to be prolix, leaving the reader to guess what it is all about.

I think this perfectly describes almost all the stories included in this collection. Notable exceptions are the “stories” by Kabir Bedi and Hugh Gantzer, which seem more like journal-entries or essays than stories.

Some of the best-known Indian authors of short stories are represented here, including Mulk Raj Anand, Krishan Chander, Ruskin Bond, Ismat Chugtai, Kamala Das, Anita Desai, Shashi Deshpande, Qurratulain Hyder, Amrita Pritam, etc. While most authors are represented by a single story, except for Ruskin Bond and Krishan Chander with two stories each, Qurratulain Hyder has four stories in this collection. Was it because she was a colleague of the editor? Maybe, maybe not; what really matters is that all her selected stories are very nice.

Not all the major Indian languages are represented here and Urdu and Punjabi can well be considered over-represented, but that's a minor quibble. Perhaps that's just a reflection of the editor's tastes or reading-habits. Striving for such an artifical “fairness and balance” can easily become detrimental to the quality of such a collection.

It is not very clear from the introduction whether all the stories were first published in The Illustrated Weekly of India. If not, it is a little puzzling that some prominent Indian writers of very good short stories, like Munshi Premchand for example, were omitted from this collection. While the “best” in the title of the book is easily understood to be entirely subjective, it would have helped if the editor had listed some of the criteria used to select the stories in this book.

Be that as it may, the book is quite enjoyable and the quality of the stories good. I eagerly look forward to reading the second volume of this collection.

Year-End Breaks

2011-01-05T00:00:00+05:30

Towards the end of the year 2010, Anusha and I went for a couple of day-trips to places near Bangalore. The first trip was to Balmuri and Yedmuri falls, along with a visit to Brindavan Gardens. The second trip was to Belur and Haalebidu along with Shravanabelagola. While we drove to the former set of destinations ourselves, we opted for a KSTDC bus-tour for the latter.

Balmuri and Yedmuri falls are near Mysore and are formed by check-dams on the river Kaveri. For some reason, Balmuri falls is more popular with tourists and has comparatively better facilities than Yedmuri falls.

Balmuri Falls

Yedmuri falls is around a kilometre or so from Balmuri falls, down an uneven mud-path. There are far fewer tourists here and no shops or boat-rides. The rocks are also a little more uneven and slippery. That said, it seemed like the more interesting of the two falls to me.

Yedmuri Falls

On the way to these falls, we went to see the KRS dam and Brindavan gardens located nearby. The dam seems to be closed to tourists now, which was a let-down. The gardens are beautiful, though not very well-maintained.

Brindavan Gardens

One of the pleasant experiences of this trip was driving down the obstruction-free NICE road, the closest thing to a US-style freeway that I've seen here, though our speed was hampered from time to time by slow-moving trucks.

For the trip to Belur, Haalebidu and Shravanabelagola, we decided to take a KSTDC bus-tour instead of driving all the way ourselves. This tour starts at 6:30 AM in the morning and drops you back in Bangalore at 10 PM in the night. The bus was a comfortable, air-conditioned Volvo and was fully-booked. As with all the KSTDC tours I have been on, we got very little time at the actual destinations and had to eat bad food at places without any alternatives nearby.

The first destination was Shravanabelagola, where we were given one hour to explore the place. To see the famous statue of Bahubali atop a rocky hill here, we had to climb over 600 steps. Perhaps because of this, several people returned much later than the assigned time. This delayed the rest of our trip by at least one hour.

The Statue of Bahubali at Shravanabelagola

The next destination was the famous Chennakeshava temple at Belur. This temple, along with the Hoysaleswara temple at Haalebidu and the Chennakeshava temple at Somanathapura (which we saw in 2005), is a magnificent example of the architectural heights reached by the Hoysala empire in the 12^th century. These temples are built using interlocking blocks of soapstone and without any mortar to bind them. Soapstone is apparently soft when quarried and hardens over time with exposure to air, making it ideally suited for making sculptures with very fine and delicate carvings.

Vishnu's Dasavatar Depicted on the Chennakeshava Temple

The Chennakeshava temple seems to have been built over more than a 100 years, with a prototype temple built first over 20 years. A curiously-recurring sculpture in these temples is that of the mythical creature Makara. There are also a lot of statues dedicated to Shantala, the wife of king Vishnuvardhana and an accomplished dancer.

Our final destination was the Hoysaleswara temple at Haalebidu. This temple was also built over more than a 100 years, but was sadly left unfinished. This temple is only open from sunrise to sunset.

The Statue of a Doorkeeper at the Hoysaleswara Temple

There is no entrance-fee for seeing either of these temples. The lighting inside these temples is far from satisfactory and makes it very difficult to properly view the sculptures. We were given only one hour each at these temples and this made for a very rushed tour of the temples by the respective guides. Treating this trip as merely an appetiser, we plan to some day go back to these temples and making certain that we have enough time on our hands to admire them at leisure.

I have uploaded some more pictures from these trips to a Picasa web-album.

(Originally posted on Blogspot.)