Lotus

Book Review: Me by Elton John

Me by Elton John
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This chatty and mostly self-deprecatory narrative is an immensely readable account of the fantastic life of Captain Fantastic, warts and all. Taking modesty to its extreme, there is no mention of Elton John’s Knighthood in the text – just one photograph with his parents and partner David! However, his excesses, be they in obsessive shopping sprees or his promiscuous life, appear to be a cry for help and comforting. His tribute to Marilyn Monroe in A Candle in the Wind could very well be describing his own life “… never knowing who to cling to…”.
Unfortunately for fervent fans of his music, like me, there are no details about his music. What inspired the music? How did the creative process produce a series of hits like Bennie and the Jets, Candle in the Wind, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, We All Fall In Love Sometimes, Curtains etc? The album with his iconic Daniel is dismissed in a couple of sentences:

I contracted glandular fever just before we went into the studio to record Don’t Shoot Me, I’m Only the Piano Player in the summer of 1972… You would never have known I was ill from listening to the album: the guy singing Daniel and Crocodile Rock doesn’t sound unwell.

There is a bit more detail about his other blockbuster:

By the time we got to the Chateau, we had so many songs that Goodbye Yellow Brick Road ended up a double album. When it came out, it took off in a way that none of us expected. It's quite a dark record in many ways. Songs about sadness and disillusion, songs about alcoholics and prostitutes and murders, a song about a sixteen-year-old lesbian who ends up dead in a subway. But it just kep selling and selling and selling until I couldn't work out who was still buying it. i don't mean that flippantly: I really didn't know who was buying it.

But dear Sir Elton, how did you and Bernie come about creating that masterpiece?
Captain Fantastic and Brown Dirt Cowboy was written on a sea voyage in between games of Bingo.
He was that rare talent who could produce hits even with a raging hangover. His enduring friendship with Bernie Taupin (The Brown Dirt Cowboy) is one constant in his life, but not much has been written about him and how their joint creative process worked.
The best and most honest autobiography of a superstar in a long time. As usual, here is another super hit for Elton John!

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The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire by William Dalrymple
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is a deeply researched engrossing account of the evolution of a rapacious company from its humble origins as a group of ambitious British merchants.
The book starts appropriately with this sentence, "One of the first Indian words to enter the English language was the Hindustani slang for plunder: loot. This word was rarely heard outside the plains of north India until the late eighteenth century, when it suddenly became a common term across Britain."
It ends ominously:

The East India Company remains today history’s most ominous warning about the potential for the abuse of corporate power – and the insidious means by which the interests of shareholders can seemingly become those of the state…… Empire is transforming itself into forms of global power that use campaign contributions and commercial lobbying, multinational finance systems and global markets, corporate influence and the predictive data harvesitn of the new surveillance-capitalism rather than – or sometimes alongside – overt military conquest, occupation or direct economic domination to the effect its ends.
Four hundred and twenty years after its founding, the story of the East India Company has never been more current.

There appears to be a topographical error. General Lake on his way to Delhi from Kanpur, after vanquishing the Aligarh Fort, is said to have camped near Agra at Sikandra at Akbar’s Tomb and then marched to Hindan 18 miles away, only to be ambushed there. This is south-west of Aligarh, across the Yamuna river and more than 100 miles from Shahadra and marching to and from there would entail crossing the Yamuna twice. The author probably meant Sikandra that is close to present day Dadri.

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The Man Who Changed Everything: The Life of James Clerk Maxwell by Basil Mahon
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The normally irascible Isaac Newton remarked in 1676 …….. If I have seen further it is by standing on the sholders [sic] of Giants. In turn, Einstein, when told that he had done great things because he stood on Newton's shoulders; Einstein replied: No I don't. I stand on the shoulders of Maxwell.

The influence of James Clerk Maxwell runs all through our daily lives. His electromagnetic waves made possible ALL forms of wireless communication. Colour TV and mobile phone screens work on the three-colour principle that he demonstrated. Pilots and astronauts fly their craft by control systems which derive from his work. Bridges and other structures were designed using his reciprocal diagrams and photoelastic techniques.

Maxwell started a revolution in the way physicists look at the world. He introduced statistical methods in physics. His droll molecule sized creature, Maxwell’s Demon, was the first example of the thought experiment so frequently used by Einstein and memorably by Schrodinger with his famously lamentable cat. At Cambridge he set up the Cavendish Lab where the electron and the atomic structure were discovered by Thomson and Rutherford later on.

His discoveries helped usher in the era of modern physics, laying the foundation for such fields as special relativity and quantum mechanics. Many physicists regard Maxwell as the 19th-century scientist having the greatest influence on 20th-century physics. His contributions to the science are considered by many to be of the same magnitude as those of Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein. In the millennium poll—a survey of the 100 most prominent physicists—Maxwell was voted the third greatest physicist of all time, behind only Newton and Einstein. On the centenary of Maxwell's birthday, Einstein described Maxwell's work as the most profound and the most fruitful that physics has experienced since the time of Newton.

Maxwell's A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism: Vol. 2 is probably, after Newton'sThe Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, the most renowned book in the history of physics. It is said that if you trace every line of modern physical research to its starting point you come back to Maxwell.

Maxwell achieved all this in a short span of life – he died at the age of 48.

So why is he not as well-known as Newton and Einstein or even Schrodinger, Planck or Bohr? Apparently he was painfully modest (laid back in today's argot) and never strove to promote his work; nor was there anyone who did it for him. Most importantly many of his ideas were way ahead of their time. Physicists recognized his work later, once experimental proof became available.

An engrossing book indeed.

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Elemental: How the Periodic Table Can Now Explain (Nearly) Everything by Tim James
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

My introduction to Chemistry was through Kipp’s Apparatus emanating noxious sulphurous (and not with an ‘f’) effluvia smelling like mephitic poultry products. Incidentally, an unfortunate classmate with inordinate flatulence was wickedly nick-named Kipps by the rest of us.

This book is a refresher course in chemistry in an irreverent yet lucid style. What were mysterious valences are elucidated by the author using simpler concepts based on Quantum Theory (surely an oxymoron!) and the wave function equation of Schrodinger Erwin (this was before he published his thought experiment abut the infelicitous feline paradox).



There is lot of interesting trivia about various elements and the Periodic Table – the basis of chemistry. Examples:

I hereby declare dysprosium to be the only element you could remove from human history and absolutely nothing much would change. We salute you, dysprosium, the most boring element on the periodic table.
Fluoroantimonic acid is supposed to be ten quadrillion times stronger than sulphuric acid. However, helium hydride is supposed to be many many times stronger than fluoroantimonic acid!

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Book Review

The Etymologicon by Mark Forsyth
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A recondite, yet risqué romp through the remote origins of the English language as we know today. Without being too pedantic, it hilariously segues from one term to a related word in a flippant and chatty style. It is quite informative but side-splitting in the venerable British humorous style of P G Wodehouseand Douglas Adams.

Here is a gem – a medieval recipe from 1450:

Puddyng of Porpoise. Take the Blode of hym, & the grece of hym self, & Oatmeal, & Salt, & Pepir, & Gyngere, & melle these togetherys wel, & then put this in the Gut of the Porpoise, & then lat it seethe esyli, & not hare, a good while: & then take hym up, & broyle hym a lyti, & then serve forth.

This is an example of an antanaclasic sentence (it keeps using the same word in different senses; get the book for the details): Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.

One term needs to be corrected from autopenotomy to autopenectomy. Again, get the book for further elucidation – it has a connection to the creators of the Oxford English Dictionary.

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Book Review

The Dark Forest by Liu Cixin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The narrative is faster paced and more gripping than in the first part (The Three-Body Problem). It tends to be rather verbose at times – almost Asimovian in the long-winded dialogues. In fact, there is a bit about Isaac Asimov’s The Foundation Trilogy in Arabic and Osama bin Laden.
No connection, but the latter's nemesis Barak Obama has this to say about the book, “Wildly imaginative, really interesting. The scope of it was immense.”
Waiting eagerly for Amazon to deliver the concluding part to learn about the confrontation between humanity and the unfortunate aliens from a planet orbiting (if that is possible) wildly around three suns!

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Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The eerie and ominous Murakamiesque atmosphere is disappointingly missing in this novel. The book is a twisted kind of love story where one sentence stands out: Death exists, not as the opposite but as a part of life.

I had expected that the theme would be based on John Lennon’s song Norwegian Wood (This Bird has Flown) about an extramarital affair:

I once had a girl
Or should I say she once had me
She showed me her room
Isn't it good Norwegian wood?
She asked me to stay
And she told me to sit anywhere
So I looked around
And I noticed there wasn't a chair
I sat on the rug biding my time
Drinking her wine
We talked until two and then she said
"It's time for bed"
She told me she worked
In the morning and started to laugh
I told her I didn't
And crawled off to sleep in the bath

The sitar was used for the first time by a rock band in this track from Rubber Soul. It is speculated Lennon's affair was with either his close friend and journalist Maureen Cleave or Sonny Freeman. Paul McCartney explained that the term “Norwegian Wood” was a sarcastic reference to the cheap pine wall panelling then in vogue in London. McCartney commented on the final verse of the song: “In our world the guy had to have some sort of revenge. It could have meant I lit a fire to keep myself warm, and wasn't the decor of her house wonderful? But it didn't, it meant I burned the f**ing place down as an act of revenge, and then we left it there and went into the instrumental.”

Mori in the Japanese title translates into English as "wood" in the sense of "forest", not the material "wood", even though the song lyrics refer to the latter.

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Book Review

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This strange tale starts slowly like a reel of string unspooling languidly - the protagonist simply fritters his life – sitting, loafing, sleeping (and having vivid wet dreams), cooking, eating, dawdling in a street, doing his laundry, ironing his clothes and other such mundane activities. To this monofilament of a life myriad strands get added in the form of enigmatic women and inscrutable, yet ominous, men literally crawling out of the woodwork.

The yarn then gets messy and entangled as the plot quickens and thickens. Events and persons get juxtaposed between the past and present. The Murakamiesque landscape turns into a rollicking read with magical realism abounding the pages.

The author’s obsession with female pinnae and mammaries is par for the course.

Murakami is a virtuoso with words. He is a great one for imbuing life into non-living stuff:

Maybe when people take their eyes off them, inanimate objects become even more inanimate.

The liquid seemed somehow uncomfortable in its tall glass, as if it had nothing better to do than produce its little bubbles.

My reality seemed to have left me and was now wandering around nearby. I hope it can find me, I thought.

When a delusion wants to come, it comes, like a period. And you can’t just meet it at the front door and say, “Sorry I am busy today, try me later.”

I experienced an eerie sensation – like déjà vu – the Great Kingham Mountains in China were part of the story in Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem that I had just finished. The same mountain range again featured in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Magical realism in reality!


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Book Review

The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book is endorsed by the redoubtable George R. R. Martin - First of his name, The Hirsute, Lord of House Verbosity, King of the Sea of Verbiage, Purveyor of Porn & Gore (followers of Game of Thrones will get the allusion).
It is based on a First Contact scenario, albeit from a Chinese perspective. Navigating through myriad canorous sounding names like Ding, Dong, Wang, Ying, Yang, Bing Bing was a bit tiresome (no racist slur implied here; it is just that one is used to protagonists named John, Dick and Jane). The book gives a glimpse of recent Chinese history about which not much is known.
The plot was quite thrilling especially the computer being constructed by aliens on yocto and zepto scales in eleven dimensions - SF aficionados will enjoy this. Now waiting for Amazon to deliver the sequels The Dark Forest and Death's End.

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Book Review

Baluta by Daya Pawar
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A book about the author’s battle with his personal demons and the sacrifices of his mother. She is the real “hero” of this narrative. Her struggles are multiplied as she is a woman, a widow, from the so called ‘lower caste’, living in grinding poverty, a son who does not acknowledge her often, suffers from diseases due to poor nutrition and hygiene and so on.

I can identify with the practice of baluta. I recall the village manual scavengers during my childhood who would not take money but come twice a year (post-rabi and -kharif harvesting) to claim their share of grain. Thankfully this reprehensible and shameful practice of manual scavenging has been done away with.

But the trend persists in a subtle fashion. Like the job the author gets as a laboratory assistant in a Veterinary College, where his job is sorting out faecal samples of sick animals, cleaning sweeping jobs in hospitals, offices and municipalities are still claimed by the euphemistically named (thanks to Gandhi) ‘People of Gods’. Sadly, it is as if these jobs appear to have been ingrained genetically into them.

Parochialism and caste are two concepts that are holding back our country from progress. Reservations in the name of affirmative action have really not helped remove these socioeconomic barriers – if anything, they divide has deepened the antagonism between castes.

Take the example of the Indian infantry (this is irrelevant in other arms of the Army, the Navy and the Air-force). Regiments are still named according to caste (Mahar Regiment, Jat Regiment, Rajput Regiment, Dogra Regiment, Naga Regiment, Maratha Light Infantry), region (Rajputana Rifles, Bihar Regiment J&K Light Infantry, Madras Regiment, Garwhal Rifles, Assam Regiment) and religion (Sikh Regiment, Sikh Light Infantry). Some of these regiments have been in existence since the 1700s albeit under a British moniker. To remove caste overtones these regiments should have neutral, yet martial sounding, names like The Grenadiers or the Brigade of the Guards.


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Book Review

THE ASSASSINATION OF INDIRA GANDHI THE COLLECTED STORIES: VOLUME ONE by Upamanyu Chatterjee
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

It was a refreshing change to read these stories after the author’s pornographic “Weight Loss”. The stories range from the poignant, to the raunchy and funny; from the scatological to the allegorical. The topics include history, ornithology, police, untouchability, homosexuality, crime and law; the reluctant IAS, marijuana stoked Agastya Sen makes a cameo appearance.
These are engaging stories about India and its myriad hues – the title could have been better. The assassination story is quite peripheral; there are richer yarns and some other true stories narrated in the author’s unique style.
At times, the writing style is typical bureaucratese – liberally sprinkled with parentheses, clauses and sub-clauses – but gripping all the same.
Waiting for the sequel!

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Book Review

1Q84 by Haruki Murakami
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

An unputdownable (sic) book that rivals James Michener's verbosity and eeriness of V. by Pynchon. Malevolent like The Bone Clocks and as sinister and skewed from reality as The City & the City. It has echoes of Gore Vidal’s Kalki and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. There is an example of super-natural sexual congress akin to Piers Anthony's Mini’s Crew (from Anthonology).

Not giving it 5 stars because it tends to be repetitive and lags at times

However, here is a hilarious exchange about a dog named Bun:

"I’ve never seen a German shepherd that liked spinach before"
"She doesn't know she's a dog:'
"What does she think she is?"
"Well, she seems to think she's a special being that transcends classification:'
"Superdog?"
"Maybe so"
"Which is why she likes spinach?"
"No, that's another matter. She just likes spinach. Has since she was a pup"
"But maybe that's where she gets these dangerous thoughts
of hers."

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Book Review - The Adivasi Will Not Dance

The Adivasi Will Not Dance by Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The only thing missing is a glossary - that is the reason for the four star rating - though it deserved five stars. Further, there some rather explicit scenes, so read with discretion.

The title story brought tears to my eyes- it was so poignantly written.

Hansda Shekhar has continued the fine tradition of doctors becoming authors e.g., AJ Cronin, Arthur Conan Doyle, Somerset Maugham, Robin Cook., Oliver Wendell Holmes, Michael Crichton, Anton Chekhov. He has a very simple yet evocative style of writing. The reader can almost taste the dust and smell the grime and filth.

The ‘happier’ stories talk about those Santhals who have been fortunate enough to get an education and a job but struggle and oscillate between their traditional values and the new ideas, technology and cultural onslaughts that they are exposed to in Indian cities. It is a microcosmic reflection of the dichotomy of Indians trying to amalgamate the world view in the age of the internet.

In contrast, the author has shown us an idyllic way of life that has been brutally shattered by ‘civilization’ and ‘progress’. He writes about the blatant exploitation of tribal Indians by corrupt policemen, greedy human traffickers, lecherous goondas, venal politicians, rapacious land-sharks, proselytizing Christian Missionaries and pointedly ignored by the government machinery.

Some excerpts: “Sarjomdih, where most of the population is Santhal and the rest, Munda; all of them are followers of Sarna, the aboriginal faith of the Chota Nagpur area…. Sarjomidh, which bore the repercussions of development, the nationalization of the mine and the factory…. Sarjomidh, which is a standing testimony to the collapse of an agrarian Adivse society and the dilution of Adivasi culture, the twin gifts of industrialization and progress. Sarjomdih, which, within sixty years, acquired all the sign of urbanity, just lie the Copper Town: concrete houses; cable television; two-wheelers; a hand-pump; a narrow, winding tarmac that everyone called the ‘main road’; and a primary school”

The last story (which left me lachrymose) is an indictment of a real polo-playing, tricolour waving MP/industrialist/steel magnate and a very vocal and popular politician who wants to turn into a Hindu state.

Some more excerpts: “If coal merchants have taken a part of our lands, the other part has been taken over by stone merchants, all Diku – Marwari, Sindhi, Mandal, Bhagat, Muslim…… What do we Santhals get in return? Tatters to wear. Barely enough food. Such diseases that we can’t breathe properly, we cough blood and forever remain bare bones.”

“…..those Kiristan missionary schools where or children are constantly asked to stop worshipping our Bonga-Buru and start revering Jisu and Mariam….. the sisters and the fathers tell our boys that their Santhal names – Hopna, Som, Singrai – are not good enough. They are renamed David and Mikail and Kiristofer and whatnot.”

“Village after village in our Santhal Parganas – which should have been a home for us Santhals – are turning into Muslim villages….. We are losing our Sarna faith our identities, and our roots. We are becoming people from nowhere.”

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Aamby Valley

Night view of the lake from NAMAK

Dawn

Evening

Aamby Valley

Evening

Dawn

The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A powerful epic, a modern-day version of Little Women, albeit rawer and more global in perspective. It is also another sad tale of rapacious colonial powers exploiting human and mineral resources of Africa; a tale of religious and spiritual rape.
I wonder why the histories of the Indian sub-continent and Africa turned out so differently after independence from their respective colonial masters. The two regions are so similar - diverse languages, customs, diet, weather, religions in the form of animism, all within one giant land-mass. India seems to be thriving, but most African countries appear to be in a mess politically and economically. Did Hinduism prevail and resist the onslaughts of Islam and Christianity or subsumed the two religions in a form of spiritual osmosis?
Rachel’s malapropisms are hilarious, although perversely appropriate in the context – executrate (execute), took for granite (took for granted), pandemony (pandemonium), Thyroid Mary (Typhoid Mary), putative (fugitive) from law. She does not seem to outgrow this propensity – on her 5oth birthday she says, “… it gives you something to compensate upon.”
Adah’s palindromes and other verbal calisthenics make delightful reading - Amen enema; Damn mad; Elapsed or esteemed, all ale meets erodes pale; A, he rose … ye eyesore, ha1>.

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The Most Powerful Object of Our Time

The Book: A Cover-to-Cover Exploration of the Most Powerful Object of Our Time by Keith Houston
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

An engrossing tale about the origins of books. The book that we hold today is the culmination of the weaving together the threads of the hoary origins of paper, printing, ink, and book-binding. From papyrus, parchment, hand-made paper to paper mills; the standardizations of paper sizes; from cuneiform writing, hieroglyphics, hand written scrolls, block printing, Gutenberg’s printing press, daguerreotypes, to modern lithography. The etymology of “foolscap”, “italics” and others is detailed in the author’s typical chatty manner.
The contributions of Chinese, Egyptians, Greeks and others is documented comprehensively. It is a pity that there is no mention of Indian writing and books in their antediluvian forms like the tree bark scrolls ‘bhoj patra.’
Somehow not as engaging as his Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols & Other Typographical Marks.

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काली सलवार और अन्य कहानियाँ by Saadat Hasan Manto
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Peopled with whores, pimps, smugglers, wastrels, charlatans and quacks. Some bits are incomprehensible due to either the language or the context. The allegorical “Dekh Kabira Roya” seems to comment on the then existing political situation. There is a poignant tale of two friends from same regiment now at war after Partition over Kashmir. Then there is a touching story of a pubescent girl.

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Garden of Fools by Robert Hutchison
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The British, especially the rapacious East India Company, may be criticized for looting India but they must be lauded for three contributions they bequeathed to the country viz., the administrative service, the vast rail network and, most importantly, the irrigation canal grid they set up to ward off the cyclical famines that decimated the population. The aim of the latter was not really altruistic – farmers paid for the irrigation water and were taxed accordingly.
This fictionalized biography of the main mover of the idea of the Ganges Canal Proby Cautley makes gripping reading. The gratuitous sexy bits were superfluous as was the detailed Afghan conflict.
What is smoothly skipped over is the rampant felling of trees in the Himalayas to fire the brick kilns meant for churning out millions of bricks to line the Canal.
However, credit must be given to Cautley and his team of engineers, need I add, to the thousands of native labourers and craftsmen, for their technical skills. The canal functions perfectly and the arched bridges still stand rock solid after 170 years. Unfortunately, the canal roads have become clogged with traffic and the trees that were lovingly planted are slowly dying off and not being replaced.
The whimsical anglicised spellings of Indian names make delightlful reading e.g., Alligurh, Mynpoorie, Kankhul, Cawnpore, Jumna, Mozuffurnuggur, Furruckabad, Oudh. Bobbachee and pawnee keep recurring.

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The Raja of Harsil: The Legend of Frederick 'Pahari' Wilson by Robert Hutchison
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This fictionalized account about the British adventurer could have been titled “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy”. Wilson was soldier in the East India Company till he deserted (out of cowardice) and went on the lam.
He was a spy and claimed to have thwarted the nefarious designs that Tsarist Russia had on Indian territory – he single-handedly caught two Russian spies in the icy heights of Nelang, and led to the capture of a Russian prince. He also allegedly played a crucial role in defeating the Sikh Army. He is said to have protected Mussoorie and Dehradoon from the mutineers of 1957 – the tallest of his claims.
He tailored his own currency and tinkered with the flora and fauna of Garwhal leading to the decimation of centuries old deodar forests and extinction of animals like the ibex, mountain goats etc. He guided blood-thirsty British officers in conducting hecatombs in the frigid regions ranging from Harsil, Himachal, Ladhak to Kashmir.
The systematic ornithocide and felling of trees led to the extinction of birds like the ‘monal’. The Brits looted India under the veneer of “development”, but Wilson raped and ravaged the sylvan Garwhal hills for his personal wealth. His felled of centuries old deodar trees and transported them free by floating them down the Bhagirathi to feed Cautley's brick klins for his Upper Ganges Canal and to provide sleepers for the burgeoning rail network in India.
He wanted to start a dynasty in the “Kingdom of Harsil” but (spoiler alert!) the hills had their revenge – his progeny turned out to be either wastrels or criminals and his lineage, thankfully, petered out.
There is a lot of duplication from the author’s other book “Garden Of Fools” and the “Himalaya Club” episodes is lifted straight from John Lang's The Himalaya Club.
Still, the book is engrossing.

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Dawn

Milkman by Anna Burns
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

I give up – just cannot finish this stream of consciousness type of book. There are vague political and religious dissensions that are incomprehensible to a non-Irish person. “Maybe-boyfriend” personifies Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle at the quantum level. Other non-committal names include “tablets girl”, “nuclear boy” and “Somebody McSomebody”. There is a gruesome description of a stomach turning mass canicide. The ‘Milkman’ has nothing to do with the dairy industry, whereas the real milkman – taking orders for milk and delivering it by his milk van – is called “the man who did not love anybody.”

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Erwin Schrodinger and the Quantum Revolution by John Gribbin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Quantum theory cannot be understood without an understanding of Newtonian physics – in fact, one must go back to the time of Galileo and then learn about the evolution in the thinking of the physical universe. Newton said, "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants."

The author lucidly explains the discoveries of pioneers like Bohr, Heisenberg, Planck, Einstein and other physicists and how Schrodinger built up on these and finally arrived at the wave theory of quantum physics discarding the particle theory. He was validated, in the face of universal opposition, by none other than Einstein himself.

He was greatly influenced by the mystical meanings of Vedanta. On a personal level, Schrodinger was a serial (at times, a parallel) philanderer who did his best work in the throes of erotic passion! The horrors of the two World Wars and the adversities that had to be faced by Austrians may explain the libidinous behaviour prevalent in Europe.

Immensely readable, but towards the end, the author tends to get rather abstruse and turgid.

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An Odyssey in War and Peace by J.F.R. Jacob
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Although a slender volume, it nonetheless encompasses the brilliant General’s career from WWII to the Kargil conflict including his stint with the BJP and governing two states – Goa and Punjab.
Gen Jacob did not suffer fools gladly and spoke his mind to incompetent and lazy seniors (he threatened to resign on a number of occasions). His calling a spade a spade, being a stickler for rules and not bending to the will of bureaucrats probably led to his not being considered for the Chief - much to the loss of the Indian Army.
He is quite dismissive of the much acclaimed Sam Manekshaw (and rightly so, the Field Marshal was a vain-glorious political person) and sidelines Gen Arora completely for their roles in the liberation of Bangladesh. Gen Jacob's contribution for this Indian military triumph is not publicly acknowledged.
Very simply written, not pretentious at all and immensely readable. It could have done with some better editing – there are a lot or repetitions. I plan to read his earlier book exclusively about the Bangladesh war “Birth of a Nation.”

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The Good Soldier Švejk by Jaroslav Hašek
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Some terms to describe this epic: Kafkaesque, Joseph Hellerian, Douglas Adamsonian, Voltairian (‘Candide’ – which is satirical take of Leibniz’s “This is the best of all possible worlds”).

This Bacchanalian romp through central Europe during World War I is a satire like Heller’s Catch-22 is of World War II. Joseph Heller’s fictional island of Pianosa appears as a paradise when compared to the hellish conditions of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire which shanghies the Czech canine-peddlar Svejk like Bukowski in “Hair”.

Svejk is like an affable version of Yossarian, apparently an innocent victim of circumstances but eventually emerges as an astute, loquacious and scheming individual, albeit resigned to his fate. Whereas Yossarian was a shirker, Svejk is willing to do everything. Svejk’s dissolute chaplain is in sharp contrast to the Chaplain in Catch-22 ‘yearning for Mary tragically’.

The venal Quartermasters will put the money-grubbing Milo Minderbinder to shame. This is how the NCOs justify the purloining of military stores: “Every man in the course of his eternal life undergoes countless changes and has to appear once in this world as a thief in certain periods of his activity. I’ve gone through this period myself”.

Esurient Baloun, cantankerous Lieutenant Dub, edacious generals, avaricious officers abound the plot as our gallivanting protagonist tries to keep up with his army unit. The garrulous and indefatigable Svejk is always ready with fables from his past to validate present events as he traipses around the countryside scrounging for drink and food.

The horrors of war are sharply brought out. War – the great equalizer: “And as the troops passed through and camped in the neighbourhood there could be seen everywhere little heaps of human excrement of international extraction belonging to all peoples of Austria, Germany and Russia. The excrement of soldiers of all nationalities and of confessions lay side by side or heaped on top of one another without quarreling among themselves”.

Alas, before Svejk has a chance to engage the enemy the book ends – the author Jaroslav Hašek dies!

The crowning glory of the book are the simple but evocative illustrations by Josef Lada.

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A Little Book of Doctors' Rules III. . . For Oslerian Clinicians.: New Revised Edition by Clifton Meador
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is, strictly speaking, not a book of rules, rather a set of guidelines and principles of clinical practice. These apply equally to the raw intern or to the hoary old practitioner and all physicians in between. Hippocrates and Osler are outdated to a large extent.

Here are some Oslerian aphorisms:
• Medicine is learned by the bedside and not in the classroom. Let not your conception of disease come from words heard in the lecture room or read from the book. See, and then reason and compare and control. But see first.
• Live neither in the past nor in the future but let each day’s work absorb your entire energies and satisfy your widest ambition.
• The good physician treats the disease; the great physician treats the patient who has the disease.
• The value of experience is not in seeing much, but in seeing wisely.
• The practice of medicine is an art, not a trade; a calling, not a business; a calling in which your heart will be exercised equally with your head. Often the best part of your work will have nothing to do with potions and powders, but with the exercise of an influence of the strong upon the weak, of the righteous upon the wicked, of the wise upon the foolish.
• We are here to add what we can to life, not to get what we can from life.
• To study the phenomenon of disease without books is to sail an uncharted sea, while to study books without patients is not to go to sea at all
• I have three personal ideals. One, to do the day’s work well and not to bother about tomorrow…The second ideal has been to act the Golden Rule, as far as in me lay, toward my professional brethren and toward the patients committed to my care. And the third has been to cultivate such a measure of equanimity as would enable me to bear success with humility, the affection of my friends without pride, and to be ready when the day of sorrow and grief came to meet it with the courage befitting a man.

These, in contrast, are the aphorisms of Hippocrates:
• We should rather purge upward in summer, and downward in winter.
• Pains seated above the diaphragm indicate purging upward, and those below it, downward.
• Dysentery, if it commences with black bile, is mortal.
• In all cases whatever, bilious discharges cease if deafness supervenes, and in all cases deafness ceases when bilious discharges supervene.
• If a person labouring under a fever, without any swelling in the fauces, be seized with a sense of suffocation suddenly, it is a mortal symptom.
• Sweats, in febrile diseases, are favourable, if they set in on the third, fifth, seventh, ninth, eleventh, fourteenth, seventeenth, twenty-first, twenty-seventh, and thirty-fourth day, for these sweats prove a crisis to the disease; but sweats not occurring thus, indicate pain, a protracted disease, and relapses.
• When the hypochondriac region is affected with meteorism and borborygmi, should pain of the loins supervene, the bowels get into a loose and watery state, unless there be an eruption of flatus or a copious evacuation of urine. These things occur in fevers.
• Blood or pus in the urine indicates ulceration either of the kidneys or of the bladder.
• When small fleshy substances like hairs are discharged along with thick urine, these substances come from the kidneys.
• Spasm supervening on a wound is fatal.
• A convulsion, or hiccup, supervening on a copious discharge of blood is bad.
• If a drunken person suddenly loses his speech, he will die convulsed, unless fever come on, or he recover his speech at the time when the consequences of a debauch pass off.
• Persons disposed to jaundice are not very subject to flatulence.
• When a person has been cured of chronic haemorrhoids, unless one be left, there is danger of dropsy or phthisis supervening……………

This book is so valuable because the author reminds doctors that they are treating a person, not a disease. With that in mind, he stresses the importance of listening to the patient, observing him, and even touching him. First, listen for clues: "Most patients can tell you why they got sick. . . Let a patient ramble for least 5 minutes when you first see them. You will learn a lot." Then, be sure you are facing the patient. "Learn to watch people's faces and eyes. Learn to watch their lower lip and then the upper lip." Finally, "Always examine the part that hurts. Put your hand on the area." Then, based on what he has heard, seen and felt, the doctor is able to begin ordering tests – but not a battery of tests: "Use laboratory tests like a rifle, not a shotgun." Over-testing can lead to over-treating.

The author says, “My fascination has always been more with the nature of the practice of medicine than with its actual practice. I have often wondered what it is that constitutes the real stuff of the practice of medicine. What are its essential elements? What is it we do that is helpful? What do we do that is harmful? Is there a way to codify and describe these necessary elements? Can we tease out the unspoken and unwritten rules by which we operate, and which determine our behaviour and make us physicians? Can we begin to explore the hazy art of the practice of medicine in some systematic way? Can we create a science of the art of the practice of medicine?”

The book codifies simple but essential guidelines which should have been taught in Medical College or learned through experience.

For example,
• Learn to listen for the “life narrative” of the patient. Diseases tend to arise from the “lived life” of the patient.
• Sit down when you talk with patients. Don’t talk with patients with your hand on the door.
• Always examine the part that hurts. Put your hand on the area.
• Touch the patient, even if you only shake hands or feel the pulse, especially with seniors. But not with paranoids.
• When you are listening to a patient, do not do anything else. Just listen.

A book that should be read and reread.


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Intern: A Doctor's Initiation by Sandeep Jauhar
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I began the book with a groan “Oh no! Another cliched story of the overworked and randy intern going through his apprenticeship in the usual flippant manner.” However, it was a pleasant change in the narrative and this turns out to be an engrossing tale of self-discovery. Here is a cynical PhD in physics deciding to pursue a career in medicine. He is confused as he weighs his options to do law or journalism (in fact, he does an internship in TIME).

He describes the gut-wrenching details of his internship. He went through a dark phase of clinical depression and a painful herniated intervertebral disc.

He addresses the ethical challenges of practicing medicine. How does one balance reality with the four cardinal principles of Medical ethics?
• Respect for autonomy – the patient has the right to refuse or choose their treatment.
• Beneficence – a practitioner should act in the best interest of the patient.
• Non-maleficence – to not be the cause of harm.
• Justice – concerns the distribution of scarce health resources, and the decision of who gets what treatment.

These are interlinked with the concepts of “Primum non nocere” – above all do no harm and “informed consent”.

A senior doctor astutely observes “Autonomy trumps everything if the patient has capacity, but who decides? The doctor, of course. So ultimately the patient can decide only if the doctor says so. In the end, the power structure in medicine is such that only doctors can decide whether patients have the right to exert their autonomy. And how do doctors decide? It is based on their experience, their prejudgement, their prejudice; and some doctors have the prejudice that patients cannot make medical decisions for themselves. So in these cases, paternalism rules, and it’s a slippery slope toward a situation where autonomy is always undermined.

In contrast, there was another senior doctor whose statement could have been taken out of Catch-22, “We can get them (the patients) to do whatever we want. As long as they agree with us, they’re not crazy.”

Interestingly, the medical world in America appears to be liberally peppered with doctors of Indian origin.

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The Sarkari Mussalman by Lt. Gen. Zameer Uddin Shah
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I first heard of the author when he had been appointed as VC of AMU. I wondered how a fauji would manage the rambunctious crowd at the hoary institution, where the ebullient students are always in a state of ferment. The press kept us informed (not always accurately, according to him) about his authoritarian attempts to suppress the mutinous atmosphere. That is when I learnt that he too was an alumnus of St Josephs, Nainital – albeit nine years my senior.
More about that later; first the book. It is simply and lucidly written, with none of usual Army bombast. I only wish the photos were of better quality – the earlier ones are grainy and not even suitable for a family album (e.g., Photo No. 28) and the later ones have been luridly photoshopped. There should have more details about his soldiering, unless these are operational secrets. He rightly says that retired faujis are a very valuable human resource and should be usefully employed in imparting their knowledge, experience and skills in nation building.
Gen Shah should not have been so circumspect about detailing his experiences during the communal riots in Gujarat. What else was this book for (hence the four star rating)? He should have laid bare those ‘wounds’ he talks about. However, it was fascinating to read about his encounters with the “Actress bhi kabhi HRD Minister thi.” What were those words from PM Modi that assuaged his feelings after one of these encounters?
His description of his time at St Joseph’s took me on a nostalgic trip my school days - to thrillers by Alistair MacLean, well-thumbed brown-paper covered Midwood books, weekly outings to town on Thursdays to watch movies at Capitol while munching 10 paise worth of peanuts. As he mentions, our potpourri of cultures and religions turned us into responsible citizens. I can vouch for the secular nature of “Sem”. Our houses may have been named after Christian saints, but all Indian festivals were celebrated. I can still taste the fruits we got on Janamashthmi. The ‘other’ were our traditional and rabid rivals Sherwood. Alas! socials with the ladies of “Sonn” (St Mary’s Convent) had ceased in our time – I would attribute the escapades of our seniors (the author included) leading to this sad state of affairs.
Incidentally, a trip to "Sem" a couple of years ago was a big disappointment. The place was in a shabby and decrepit state. The original Irish Brothers are now an extinct lot and their indigenous replacements are from the familiar Bhartiya milieu of lazy corrupt individuals.

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Gene Machine: The Race to Decipher the Secrets of the Ribosome by Venki Ramakrishnan
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Fascinating. Very engrossing manner of explaining the arcane world of crystallography and molecular biology. The intrigues of the Nobel Prize and other prizes in various sciences is a revelation.

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Of Counsel: The Challenges of the Modi-Jaitley Economy by Arvind Subramanian
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

For the lay person who does not know the difference TBS and GBS or GDP and GTT, this book was very simply and lucidly written – at least in parts. The sections on Power and complicated Fiscal stuff was gibberish to me. The initial sections were very informative, as was the section on Agriculture.

The postscript on Federer and Nadal was the author’s tribute to these legends of tennis. Particularly evocative was the photo of Federer hitting a backhand and the similarity in grace with a ballerina.

How the GST evolved is fascinating stuff. Alas, the ‘real’ reason for demonetization was not there....

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The Curse of God: Why I Left Islam by Harris Sultan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a book with a lot of promise but is ruined by convoluted and repetitive arguments that, at times, read like an incoherent rant. The author’s specious contention is that scientific concepts in the Koran were based on the prevailing knowledge at the time of its writing and are,hence, not divine revelations. The Koran apparently maintains, for example, that the earth is geocentric rather than heliocentric.
Nit-picking aside, he has rightly pointed out that twisted interpretations of the Koran suit the Muslim clergy.
This warping of facts is what is happening in Hinduism. I am concerned by the increasing misrepresentation of Hindu myths as the truth, by both Hindu fanatics and Hindu laity alike. They ludicrously attribute Hindus in the hoary past of pioneering test-tube babies, organ transplant and plastic surgery. Another preposterous claim is that in the Mahabharata during the war in Kurukshetra, nuclear weapons and flying chariots were supposedly used as weapons of mass destruction. In this increasingly bizarre scenario, the most risible example is the farcical debate going on about the caste of Hanuman the Monkey God. One two-bit politico (a Muslim to boot) contends that the mythological god is a Muslim as the name Hanuman ends like other Muslim names like Rehman, Suleiman etc.
However, the book is immensely readable, supplemented as it is with interesting graphics and statistics.

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William Osler: A Life in Medicine by Michael Bliss
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This hagiography is the account of the life of William Osler who has been put on a pedestal by his acolytes on par with Christ and Shakespeare. He learnt and practised medicine during the sanguineous period of blood-letting (His father nearly died as a result of enthusiastic leeching prescribed during a bout of pneumonia).
Bacteriology came into existence, X-Rays were discovered during his lifetime. He died before the antibiotic era – succumbing to multiple lung abscesses that resulted from pleural effusion, in turn a consequence of pneumonia. His only succour was morphine – he avidly prescribed opioids himself.
He misdiagnosed often (but boldly admitted his shortcomings), did not innovate or make original discovery. Yet he will forever be remembered for the basic clinical principles of history taking, observing and examining the patient closely in order to establish a diagnosis or rather at a set of differential diagnoses.


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