Nine Lives

I hadn't read any books of William Dalrymple before this, which was probably for the best. I approached this book as a fresh one by another author without being prejudiced by his earlier writings.

'Nine Lives' appealed to me from the time I heard about it in the media. Here was a book that spoke about searching for the sacred in the modern India. At the same time I was skeptical that the book would dissect India and its religious beliefs and present it from a view point of a Westerner thereby making it sounds spiritual or worse still comical. And so I started the pages with trepidation.

Suffice to say 'Nine Lives' is one of the best books that I have read in a long time - especially about India. William Dalrymple shows why he loves India so much as he approaches each subject with an open mind and presents the religious belief in a neutral manner. He does not put his views on the subject matter but rather presents it as a learning experience informing the readers about the belief, giving a backgrounder of the same and taking us on a journey of the person in question.

Starting from the first story of the Jain Nun and the concept of Sallekhana he captures your mind. The book presents various facets of India's lost religious cults and masters which - I am embarrassed to say - even I didn't know of. I've learnt a whole new face of India which I was unaware of.

From spirituality of the Jain munis in 'The Nun's tale' to overturning the oppressive caste system in India for a brief moment of time in "The Dancer of Kannur".

From explaining how religion was viewed in a sexual form in India and the challenges of latter day prostitution in "The Daughter's of Yellama" to showcasing how 'illiterate' villagers of Rajasthan can remember and sing the wonderful 5,000 couplet epics in "The Singer of Epics".

From bringing to life the real background of the Runa Laila hit song 'Dama Dam Mast Kalandar' and introducing a Bihari lady in Sindh Pakistan in "The Red Fairy" to the absolutely amazing story of the Tibetan monk who took up arms to fight for his motherland and presenting the true angst of the Tibetan folks on the China invasion in "The Monk's Tale".

From showing us how God's idols are made in "The Maker of Idols" to the amazing story of the sadhus in the cremation grounds of Tarapith in Kolkata in "The Lady Twilight" and the Bauls of West Bangal in "The Song of the Bling Minstrel".

From one part of India to another William Dalrymple takes us through a journey of exotic India and presents facets of India that we may not be aware of. The best part is that it really does present India in its true form - not in a spiritual India or a comical India or a yoga-istic India but in its true form.

I highly recommend this book to everyone - Indian or not - to understand what India's religions are about, especially the so called exotic ones.

I rate this 5/5!

Outliers

Malcolm Gladwell's 'Tipping Point' has become a verb, his 'Blink' was OK and his 'Outliers' will open your eyes in the first half and re-instate what you already know in the second. It is a MUST READ book for everyone and it will help you understand a lot of things that seem obvious - why are Asians (actually Chinese, for Malcolm) better at Maths and how is that connected to Rice Paddy farming? Why was Korean Air the worst airline with multiple crashes and how that was linked to their culture?

The best things about Malcolm Gladwell's writing is that he starts off with a story that gets you engrossed, then questions the assumptions that we have made and finally puts forth his hypothesis. This type of writing gets you interested to know what will be the next story and as you read the book you try to question the assumptions in the story and try to get one step ahead to guess his hypothesis to follow. This ensures that you stay with the book and don't get bored too easily. Other writers of non-fiction should learn from that.

Gladwell has split the book into two parts - Opportunity & Legacy.

In Opportunity he presents the facts that success is a combination of multiple factors and not just hard work. It depends on your upbringing, your lucky breaks, the society and your hard work. As you start the book there is a possibility of falling into the trap that you are not successful because of the month or year that you were born. Gladwell starts by comparing the best ice hockey players of Canada, best basketball players of US and concludes that kids born in the first half of the year are the ones who turn out to be most successful. This is because of the cut off date for trying for these leagues. Without revealing too much (on my side) he draws a conclusion that the kids born in the latter part of the year in these countries might as well not try for the league playoffs and hopes that the country's sports administration wakes up to this fact. The year you were born in also determines if you have been successful although this is really in hindsight. He presents facts of the computer revolution and compares the age of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Vinod Khosla and other successful IT people drawing a conclusion that they were born just at the right time to take advantage of the revolution.

You might despair as you read this but the books really gets interesting after this. An underlining factor of his book is the '10,000 rule' where he says that to be successful in anything you want to do, you need to have put 10,000 hours of practicing that under your belt before you can even think of being good at it. Bill Gates had 10,000 hours of programming before he started thinking of Microsoft, Beatles had 10,000 hours of playing in Hamburg before they became famous, successful pilots have 10,000 hours of flying before they become good and so on. So practice hard at what you want to be good at. There is no escape from hard work.

But it also depends on your upbringing and if you parents have taught you to question everything or bow down to authority. Chris Langan is the person with the highest IQ but because he does not have good social skills and is unable to converse with people or question them or present his case, he is not as successful or as famous as Einstein. It also depends on what your ancestors used to do as you tend to carry their values and teachings with you. The reason Jewish lawyers are so successful is because their grand parents or parents use to own sweat shops and taught their children the value of hard work and the relationship between effort and reward. If you have not seen or been taught that, you tend to take life easy and shy away from hard work therefore not getting the 10,000 hours under your belt.

The second section of Legacy deals with explaining that it is also important where you have come from. This is where it got really interesting for me. He explains the reason of Korean Air disastrous run as an airline and presents the study of PDI - Power Difference Index. This determines how you respond to authority and how you interact with someone in a position of power over you. I think this section makes sure that you get all your money back as reading this will explain to you how to react and work with people from Korea or Japan or India or US for that matter.

In summary, Malclom Gladwell seems to say the same thing that we knew all along. While luck may favour you and give you some chances, there is really no shortcut to hard work.

Success still depends on leveraging the opportunities that you get, understanding and respecting your values and culture and doing plain hard work.

I rate it 4.5/5

Dance Dance Dance

This is the second Murakami that I picked up to read back-to-back. While 'The Elephant Vanishes' was a great collection of eclectic stories, 'Dance Dance Dance''s beauty lies in the fact that the prose is actually like a great dance.

It begins slowly, reaches a nice little pace in the first half, a crescendo towards the middle and ends on a beautiful note.

As Murakami build his characters in the first few pages - the main character is unnamed but this is his story, he slowly but surely pushes your imagination and draws you into the life of the character. It is a slow book to start but if you can get beyond the first 50 - 60 pages, you are in for a treat. Murakami's prose in this book especially is really like a dance. It flows and grabs you in its fluid nature. The beauty of his prose is that you can actually picturise the incidents as they are happening in the book. For me that is the secret of a fictional book's success. If I can smell the characters, feel them and picture them in the story, then the book is worth spending time on.

From the beginning when he re-visits the Dolphin hotel only to realise that it has changed drastically but is still central to his life to the end when he returns back to the hotel it is an amazing story of connectedness and how each person can lead you forward into your life. Each of Murakami's characters have their flaws and that's what makes them so interesting. They don't lead perfect lives and even if on the surface you thought that they do, if you scratch the surface you realise that each one of them fights with their own demons.

The book is also a great collection of amazing characters that come to life. Yuki, the adolescent lonely teenager with special gifts; Gotanda, the darling of B grade movies with a secret that could destroy him; Yumiyoshi, the regular but beautiful hotel receptionist who wants to sleep with the main character but doesn't know if she should; Ame- Yuki's mother, a super talented photographer who knows only that - to photograph and lives her life in her pictures; Dick North, the one armed poet who can slice bread more efficiently than anyone else and whose life is about subservience and serving and finally Murakami's own poetic dig at himself - Hiraku Makimura, an ex-successful writer who thinks money can buy everything. I particularly liked the last touch of Murakami about the author down on his luck. Wonder if that's how he saw himself down the years.

I won't reveal the story or the plot but suffice to say that there are certain images from this book that will stay with you for a long time - Yuki with her headphones listening to music; Yumiyoshi with her glasses behind the hotel's reception; Gotanda and his Maserati. You will also remember and hear the music in the story when it comes up.

Murakami has a facsination for loneliness and many of his stories deal with this aspect of life. Thankfully 'Dance Dance Dance' does not end in loneliness for the main character.
I rate it 4.5/5. Read it.......you might just like it.

The Elephant Vanishes

What do you say about Haruki Murakami? I was introduced to Murakami by the book shop owner of the Mumbai airport. He almost forced the Murakami on to me saying that I will like it. I was very skeptical as I started reading my first Murakami (Hard Boiled Wonderland and End of the World) but soon I was hooked to his writing style.

His writing has poetry in it and you can almost taste, smell and see what he wants you to feel. His stories also are pretty esoteric in nature in the sense that they do not have a clear beginning, middle and end. The trick of Murakami's stories are that they force you to think about them and slowly peel away the layers as you reach the gist of the story. Cliched as it may sound, reading his stories reveal different things to you everytime.

Now I am a great believer in the fact that a story should have a clear purpose and objective and must have a beginning, middle and end. I ideally do not like stories that seem to go all over the place and don't seem to say anything specific. This was a reason why I was surprised with myself that I like Murakami so much. Post the first book, I have read many of his books including Sputnik Sweetheart, Blind Willow Sleeping Woman, After the Quake & What I talk about when I talk about running.

I recently finished reading 'The Elephant Vanishes' which is again a collection of short stories. Like most of his short stories some of them are brilliant, some average and some that just don't make any sense. Of course these are very personal opinions and may not apply to you. So let's see how the stories pan out with my ratings for each of them.

1. The Wind Up Bird and Tuesdays Women (2/5): This falls under the 'What the.....' category. Its a bad way to start a book and I have no clue what the story meant or is supposed to mean. In fact all I remember is that I rated it 2/5 because I didn't quite like it.
   
2. The Second Bakery Attack (3/5):Explores relationships between a couple and how some emotions shared can lead to interesting consequences. The metaphor that Murakami uses about the volcano under the sea to describe the conflicting emotions in the central character's mind is really awesome.
3. The Kangaroo Communique (2/5):Didn't understand. Starts off well, engages you in the middle but loses track somewhere.
   
4. On seeing the 100% perfect girl one beautiful April morning (4/5): One of the best love stories. What if you met the person of your dreams, didn't believe in it and wanted to test out the theory?
   
5. Sleep (3.5/5):What would happen if you just couldn't sleep and if you didn't need sleep? The story explores some interesting emotions, dwells into realm of reality and semi-consciousness but ends rather abruptly.
6. The fall of the Roman Empire, The 1881 Indian uprising, Hitler's Invasion of Poland, and The realm of raging winds (4/5): Nothing is as it seems. The story does not talk about any one of the occasions but rather the author tags his daily diary entry with things that he can remember them by. Very interesting story.
7. Lederhosen (3/5): What drives a woman to just divorce her husband of many years when he asks for a simple gift? It forces you to think about how you take your relationships for granted.
8. Barn Burning (3/5): If faced with a prior knowledge that someone is going to act on a act of vandalism, what would you do? Will you scout the area to find out if everything is OK and obsess about it? Makes you think about the times when you obsessed about inconsequential things that don't matter in your life.
9. The Little Green Monster (3/5): Explores the power of the mind over things that initially frighten you.
10. Family Affair (4/5): Everyone will immediately identify with this story as each one of us sizes up and tries to categorise members of our family or a possible new entrant in the family.
11. Window (4/5): Explores Murakami's favorite topic of loneliness and how a woman copes with it. Can a young man who has no connection to her be able to fill the gap?
12. TV People (3/5): What if you can notice things that other people don't? It explores the idea of intuition and suppressed emotions.
13. A slow boat to China (4/5): Explores the effect of different people at different times in one's life.
14. The Dancing Dwarf (5/5): Can compromises ruin your life? Explores how a simple act of compromise to get something can affect your life adversely.
15. The Last lawn of the afternoon (3/5): Again explores loneliness and what people do to fill the gap.
16. The Silence (5/5): Explores how a single wrong act can have long lasting consequences and change your life, for better or worse.
17. The Elephant Vanishes (4/5): Explores how certain important things at one time can diminish over time and lose their importance.

Overall a really good book with some brilliant stories that make up for the average ones.

A 7/10 rating!

Oh Shit, Not Again!

What a way to start the first book review on a blog - but that's the name of the book I just finished reading. Its not a line to start the blog with. :)

Oh Shit, Not Again! is a book by Mandar Kokate and published by Expression Publications and this is the first book that they have published.

Its a story of five friends and their trials and tribulations across a period of few months. The central character is Raj who moves into the locality of the novel's setting, meets with the other characters in the book and talks about it in a first person perspective.


Why did I pick up this book from an obscure writer?
The name is the first attraction. When you see a novel name like that you have to pick up the book and see what it is about. Then you turn to the back cover to get a summary of the contents. Kudos to the publishers for making that quite interesting as well.

Have you ever experienced what happens when a porn movie is mistakenly played in front of your grandma and the CD player refuses to stop?
OR
Have you ever experienced what happens when a mixture of vodka and soft drink is server to hundreds of people gathered for a party?
OR
Have you ever experienced what happens when you are conspired into a murder that you had merely witnessed?

And a few more such questions adorn the back cover. The book promises to answer these questions through the eyes of the five friends. Most of us have been caught in one such situation and would love to read about it from a different perspective.

The story sounded interesting and coming from an Indian author in an Indian setting, I decided to pick it up. It cost me Rs 150/-

Was the book worth it?
The story had tremendous potential and in the right hands could have worked out to be a great book.

Mandar's writing style is rudimentary and you can see that he is desperately trying to be an author. His prose uses words like preclude, perjure and conspire where they are not needed. You can see that he uses these 'big' words because he thinks that's how good authors write and so he should use them as well. Given also that his characters are all college going students in the age bracket of 19 - 22, the use this language is completely unnecessary.

How many times have you told your friend "C'mon yaar, you can't perjure" or "What if someone precludes me over there?" I wonder if Mandar even knows the meanings of these words and the correct usage of them.

His characters are not well developed and there are gaping holes in the storyline. A lot of situations are mentioned that have not been developed well and no justifications are given for them. The main character is carrying on an 'affair' with two women - a girl of his age and an older married woman with a child. He seems to take them to hotels and spend money but there is no explanation of where he gets that kind of money from. After all he is just a student and does not have a job. Then again he gets caught up in a murder mystery that just seems to disappear in a whimsical manner.

Mandar also cannot seem to decide if he is writing for an Indian audience or a global audience. His writing seems to suggest that he writes for India but hopes that the global audience also picks up his book. Money for e.g is referred to in Million rupees denominations. Mandar also is unable to decide if his story is a love story or a murder mystery or a story of his main character's growth into adulthood. There are liberal doses or innuendos of sex - Raj gets to kiss three women and sleeps with two.

In all an average first attempt at a novel. Mandar should have read through at least a couple of more drafts of his story before sending it for publication and the publishers should have done the same.

The first page of the book reads - "Beware before you read...........you may die laughing". We do die laughing but unfortunately not because of the writing but because of the lack of it!

All in all its o.5/5

The Start!

I am a voracious reader and I need a book to end my day. My interests vary from regular fiction, spanning thrillers, murder mysteries, sci-fi, romance to management books and everything in between.

This blog is my attempt to review the books and also mention what I liked, what I did not, my impression of the book, what I learnt and if there is a KEY MESSAGE that I took away from the book.