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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