No Follow-Through

Here are two photographs of two different configurations of three iron balls that my brother and I used as a school-kids while learning tennis. I liked the idea of taking these tennis-aids out-of-context. Here memory and physicality collide.

Rock and Roll Jihad

Salman Ahmed, the leader of the once-banned Pakistani sufi-rock band Junoon, recently published his autobiography, Rock And Roll Jihad. The book is essentially about the struggles of a rock musician against close-minded Islamic society. It’s about man who fights for his rights to free speech and thought, while Pakistan goes through tempestuous political times during the doomed reigns of General Zia, Benazir Bhutto, Nawaz Sharif and General Musharaf. Salman practices a benevolent, open-minded form of Islam that he believes is the “real” Islam. Through his music he attempts to remind the world of the values that “true” Islam stands for at a time when most of the world has stereotyped Muslims as trigger-happy jihadis. At the end of the book you respect the man for standing up for what he believes in, and for walking his talk and music. Through grilled and derided on an American TV show, just after 9/11, Salman continues to remind us than only a few Muslims are terrorists, and most Muslims are peace-loving people.

The Mother of Mohammed - A Woman's Extraordinary Journey Into Jihad

If you ever need to support the statement that truth is stranger than fiction, this book is the only evidence you will need. Whenever I speak to a friend about it, the first question he will ask is, "Is this fiction?" And, as always, with hidden glee, I say no.

The moment I saw a review of this book in The Economist earlier this year, it was love at first sight. I wrote to the Australian publishers (The University of Melbourne Press) of this book and eventually got the permission to publish it for the Indian market. You can see the Australian and Indian covers here.

The book rapidly moves from one climax to the next, like a John Grisham novel. The final climax is the aftermath of September 11, 2001 - the US bombing of Afghanistan. By this point in the biography, the Australian protagonist, Rabaih Hutchinson, is the second wife of Abu Walid, a senior leader of the al-Qaeda. She had previously married and effectively divorced a string of staunch Muslim men in Indonesia and Pakistan. She is forced to flee Afghanistan and lives under house arrest in Iran for 2 years before moving back to Australia, where she is considered a threat to national security, for dubious reasons, according to the author. For a girl who grew up in a sleepy Australian suburb and dated a young surfing star, this is quite a journey.

The Millions Room

I was stunned by the beauty of the Millions Room in the Schonnbrunn Palace in Vienna. The room was dimly lit when I visited it, as opposed to the glowing red in the photograph I stole from the Palace website. I was fascinated that Indian art was famous in 18th-century Vienna. I'll quote the palace website description of the room, because it gives a wealth of information:

Originally called the Feketin Cabinet, this room became known as the Millions Room on account of its precious rosewood panelling.

Set into sixty-one Rococo cartouches in this panelling are Indo-Persian miniatures showing scenes from the private or court life of the Mogul rulers in India in the 16th and 17th century.

In order to fit the miniatures into the asymmetrical shapes of the cartouches, individual leaves were cut up by members of the imperial family and put together to form new pictures in a sort of collage.

Another remarkable feature of this room is the chandelier, a piece of Viennese craftsmanship dating to 1760, made of bronze with enamel flowers. The bust behind the settee is of Maria Theresa's youngest daughter, Marie Antoinette, later Queen of France.

I do remember some of the minatures being scenes from the lives of Hindu kings and queens, and not only from those of Moghul rulers. If anyone is interested in doing a research project on this room (and knows how to get funding for a flight and stay in Vienna as well) count me in!

Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

While reading Outliers, I reminisced about the time when I was in Business School, and was struggling with the art of cracking cases for management consulting interviews. Some interviews went disastrously, but I finally got the hang of deconstructing cases by the end of the 2nd-year interview cycle. But the fact is that I'm not in consulting, and my thought processes are far less structured now.

The book underlies how a systematic approach to problems can yield some eye-opening results. I admire the examples Gladwell presents, and depth to which he has researched each one. However his basic argument is very simple: that success is dependent on hidden advantages, extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies.

There's one point I don't agree with. In order to explain why Americans of Asian descent do better in college than the majority of Americans, Gladwell makes the generalization that all Asians come from rice growing cultures. I'd momentarily accept the argument that farmers who worked on rice fields learned to work harder than other farmers in other regions of the world, whose crops were more seasonal. However, assuming that all hard-working Asians can be traced to paddy fields, sounds a tad bit simplistic to me. When I was in the US earlier this year, I watched a high-school spelling competition on TV. About 70%+ of the finalists were of Indian descent. I can wager that their families in India had dramatically different backgrounds, and many of the competitors' parents may have immigrated from cities. The impact of an agrarian lifestyle on family culture could have been erased for at least three to four generations.

Firmin - Adventures of a Metropolitan Lowlife by Sam Savage

What do lowlifes do? They "infest." Firmin, the rat-protagonist, says that "infested" is an interesting word. He writes, "Regular people don't infest, couldn't infest if they tried. Nobody infests except fleas, rats... When you infest, you are just asking for it. One day I was talking to a man in a bar, when he asked me what I did for a living. I answered, 'I infest.' I thought that was a pretty ironic thing to say, but the man didn't get it. He thought I had said 'I invest' and started asking me for tips on where he should put his money. So I suggested he invest in construction. The shithead."

You have probably realized that we aren't talking about a Ratatoille-like character (I haven't seen the cartoon, but everyone I talk to about the book makes that instant association) We are talking about a rat who reads literature; loves jazz and plays the piano; enjoys watching beautiful women, whom he calls "the lovelies," dance (yes we are talking about strippers); and is a connoisseur of blue movies in a rundown theater. If this was a description of a single man well into his 40s, we wouldn't bat an eyelid, would we?

He's had two serious relationships (no, not of the sexual nature, but friendships) in his short life. One with a bald bookshop owner, which is sadly imaginary, and another with a washed-out science-fiction writer. What begins as a light, funny novel, ends in, what on a rat-scale could be termed, an apocalypse. The neighborhood in which he lives is leveled to the ground by the city authorities. This includes the second-hand bookshop in which he grew up.

The author has the most fun in the book as he plays with and teases the reader. I only wish he ended the book as well as he had started it.

The black-and-white illustrations in the book bring Firmin into our world. I especially like the one in which he plays his tiny piano painted over with little flowers. The old book covers or title pages of early editions of books such as The Grapes of Wrath, Moby Dick, and Middlemarch dot the book irregularly, and remind the reader that this book is really about the love of books and reading. I think that this book is also about the death of the book and reading, at least in the Western world.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

One Sunday morning, I was listening to an NPR book podcast in which Junot Diaz was interviewed. I was intrigued by the concept of his book and when I chanced up on it at a Barnes and Noble during my visit to New York in June, I had no hesitation in picking it up. And what a good move that was.

The book is about the members of a Dominican family in the US. Since Dominicans rarely surface in literature, I found the book immediately interesting. However, the core of the novel is universal, and it's about how falling in love with the wrong person adversely affects your near and dear ones. But the book is more about how falling in love with the wrong person at the wrong time can ruin a family for generations. It's about how pain begets pain and abuse gets passed on from generation to generation. Despite the glum thematic summary, I loved the book, and raced through most of it.