Palace of Illusions

Ramayana and Mahabharata are India's most revered mythologies and its difficult to go wrong with them as long as one sticks to the original story and does not diverge from it. While Ramayana is the idealist story and strives to tell things in black and white, its really the Mahabharata that catches our imagination and forces us to think at multiple levels about the reality of life, people and relationships.

I've always been fascinated with Mahabharata and its multi-level messages. So when my friends told me about this book it sounded very intriguing from a simple fact that I had not come across the story written from a different perspective. I tried to get this book way back in June but picked up another book by the same author and reviewed that.

Panchali / Draupadi is by far the most interesting character of Mahabharata. She is born out of fire (some say by mistake) to fulfill a dreadful prophecy. She is married to five brothers each of which represent one true facet of a human being. She embodies different forms of love - a pure love for Krishna and a hidden love for Karna. She is a woman driven by strong emotions of revenge and self belief to an extent that she ignores her own children. She has the power to drive men to different destinies. She is a creative person harboring a dream of a beautiful home only to see it crushed. With so many different images and facets of a single person it would be a daunting task to bring to pen her side of the story. And I thought that would be the biggest challenge of this book.

'Palace of Illusions' is in some way able to address all these facets of her life but only superficially. Each facet is touched upon, scratched at the surface and then left alone. Chitra leaves you wanting to hear more about Panchali's views on certain subjects probably because of commercial aspects of making the book to a readable length. We get to see understand her need for an open palace filled with wonders and her final realisation of the vision but do not get to explore why she chooses certain things in the palace. We get to feel her angst as she is dragged to the court by Dushasan but do not get to hear her sadness, her views, her questions, her accusations and her anger at the impotence of the court. Almost every Indian knows the story and knows what happened in it from a man's perspective. This would have been a great opportunity to present a woman's perspective of some of the key elements of the story. I feel the author missed the opportunity and instead focussed on surface level to try and present the entire story in one sitting.

Mahabharata from the eyes of Panchali had the potential to essentially rewrite the story as we know it and force us to think about it from an oppressed person's perspective. Palace of Illusions fails on that count. It does not make us think. Rather it makes lusting for more depth. Its almost like a film that fails to live up to the expectations sets by the trailor. The image that you left with at the end of the book is that of a pining Panchali who would have been much happier if she would have married Karna rather than Arjun. And that's not the image that I wanted to have.

Having said that its still a great read. It exposes you to a different perspective of the story and brings to life some of the old debates of good and evil, of ego and subjudication, of dreams and reality, of truth and lies, of destiny and actions.

I rate the book 3/5 as it left me wanting more. I hope Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni comes out with a more detailed version.

Predictably Irrational

There is always a danger that the back-cover summary of a book does not match up to its content. While the back-cover summary sounds interesting, the book hardly lives up to it. And that is especially true for a non-fiction management book.

Thankfully, Predictably Irrational, is not one such book. The back-cover summary is what caught my eye in the plethora of books that wanted to jump into my bag through my wallet. (Too cheesy, isn't it? but I loved writing that line).

We've all grown up 'knowing' that there are two decision centers in our life - the logical mind and the emotional heart. We've all been told that we should take all our decisions using our logical mind weighing the different things and to try and ignore our heart tugging decisions from the gut. Mind always rules true in the long run. At the other end when we learn about the market dynamics we have learnt that market forces always determine the way a market operates in the long run. Demand and Supply, my friend, determine what sells, how it sells, why it sells etc etc.

And that's the truth, right? It works all the time, right? WRONG. That's what Dan Ariely wants us to know.

Predictably Irrational 'exposes' the fact that our decisions are primarily based on our social norms which combine our logical thinking and emotional state of mind. Dan Ariely tries to prove this not through subjective philosophy but bases it on numerous multiple 'experiments' that he and his fellow psychologists have conducted to test each assumption. This is the science of 'behavioral economics'.

Some of what Dan writes in his book and informs us are facets that we knew as truth but it provides some great validation though scientific study. Given a FREE thing don't we always graduate towards it? Do you end up buying six pairs of socks if there is a FREE offer with it even though you may not need the socks at all? To test this hypothesis Dan and his team did a chocolate experiment giving random people different types of chocolates, then discounting them by the same percentage which made one sample free. What do you think happened?

To test what effect sexual arousal has on our decisions they asked a group of men some questions first, then asked them to answer them again as they saw porn on a laptop. To test if our headache reduces if we take a higher cost painkiller, they zapped some students with an electric shock then gave them different pills letting them know the costs. Some were just sugar! To find out if dealing with cash makes us more honest, they did experiments where they asked students to answer a quiz then split them into groups that had to show the answers and take some amount for each correct answer. Another group had to only tell the evaluator how many answers were correct and take the relevant cash while the third group did not have to tell anyone but could take the money from the box. To test if we are inherently dishonest they made people recall the Ten Commandments before taking a test or doing an activity.

Interesting tests, all of them. I will not divulge what the results were but trust me that when you read the book some of the results will surprise you and make you think. Some will make you want to put some actions in your workplace.

This is a very interesting book and I am fascinated by the science of 'behavioral economics' and how the psychologists can take simple experiments and apply it across our behavior. Are we really like that and can we be explained by these experiments? Some chapters will make it very clear why so many of us are in credit card debt and why debit cards are the best thing. Why condoms in schools may not be that great an idea as compared to sex education.

I suggest that you read this book to open your mind. I rate it 3/5, if only because I am just not sure about the science but it is fascinating reading.