The First World War Adventures of Nariman Karkaria

The First World War Adventures Of Nariman Karkaria : A Memoir by Nariman Karkaria


The artistic style of the cover reminds one a Tintin comic.
This is an extraordinary travelogue of an inveterate wanderer. His meanderings from Navsari to London via Bombay, Hong Kong, Peking, Manchuria, frozen Siberia, Petrogard, Finland, and the Scandinavian countries way back at the beginning of the twentieth century are inconceivable today. He is quite an engaging raconteur narrating his adventures in a chatty humorous style. He was an astute observer of his surroundings and the people he encountered while satisfying his wanderlust.
He mentions his harrowing experiences in the muddy trenches of Somme, the sandy wastes of Egypt, and the horrors of the Balkan war with equal elan as his awe of the Caucasian mountains, the beauty and spirituality of churches and mosques in Jerusalem and what was then known as Constantinople and the women he encounters.
His persistence in getting drafted into the British Army rather than the native Indian Army shows his feelings of superiority as a Parsi. This was most evident when he entered Jerusalem and gloated over the exploits of Persian invaders in the past.

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Wolves and Other Stories by Bhuwanshwar

Wolves and Other Stories by Bhuwaneshwar
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Towards the end of his life, the author fell into a psychotic state and died a pauper’s death – all alone, sick and neglected by family and friends. Similarly in his stories, death, suffering, melancholia, despair pervade the lives of ordinary people like teachers, doctors, postmen, housewives in dismal, dark, desolate, desperate but, dreamy landscapes.
At the risk of losing your sanity, it is advisable not to read all the stories in a single sitting. However, it’s a profound book, plumbing the depths of human despair and hope. If one is feeling inordinately euphoric, one just has to read one of the stories to come crashing back to reality.
The only drawback is that there are a mere twelve stories in the collection - wish there had been more.

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Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This was written around the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, but the threat of a nuclear holocaust is ever present in today’s world with anally-retentive mad mullahs, hyper-libidinal but microcephalic dicktators waving their I see bee ems as defiant compensatory gestures. However, rather than the nuclear peril, this book describes the end not with a bang, but with an eternal freeze brought on by an isomer of water - ICE-9.
Here is a glossary as a ready reckoner for terms used by Bokonon:

Boko-maru - the supreme act of worship of the Bokononists, which is an intimate act consisting of prolonged physical contact between the naked soles of the feet of two persons.
Borasisi – Sun.
Busy, busy, busy - words Bokononists whisper upon witnessing an example of how interconnected everything is.
Duffle - the destiny of thousands of people placed on one stuppa.
Duprass - a karass that consists of only two people, who always die within a week of each other.
Foma - harmless untruths; lies that bring one comfort.
Granfalloon - a false karass; i.e., a group of people who imagine they have a connection that does not really exist.
Karass - a group of people who, often unknowingly, are working together to do God's will. The people can be thought of as like the fingers that support a Cat's Cradle.
Now I will destroy the whole world... - What a Bokononist says before committing suicide.
Pabu – Moon
Pool-pah - wrath of God or "shit storm"
Saroon - to acquiesce to a vin-dit
Sin-wat - a person who wants all of somebody's love for him/herself
Stuppa - a fogbound child (i.e. an idiot)
Vin-dit - a sudden shove in the direction of Bokononism
Wampeter - the central, perhaps unknown, motivation of a karass
Wrang-wrang - Someone who steers a Bokononist away from their line of perception

Whereas the neologisms in A Clockwork Orange have lexical origins from Russian or have a sort of perverse logic about them (devotchka, the old in and out appy polly logies, bruiseboys, chepooka, guttiwuts, lubbilubbing), the terms of Bokonoism are Carrollian – whimsical, poetic, nonsensical yet imbued with a sublime beauty and depth. However, with the incomprehensible dialect of San Lorenzo – the spiritual home of Bokononism – in translating “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” Kurt Vonnegut Jr. surpasses both Anthony Burgess and Lewis Carroll

Tsvent-kiul, tsvent-kiul, lett-pool store,
Ko jy tsvantoor bat voo yore,
Put-shinik on lo shee zo brath,
Kam oon teetron on lo nath,
Tsvent-kiul, tsvent-kiul, lett-pool store,
Ko jy tsvantoor bat voo yore.

Nonetheless, for all its weirdness, the language is not a patch on the neologistic portmanteau words of Finnegans Wake.
Archetypal vintage Vonnegut - both thought provoking, as well as enjoyable.

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Galápagos by Kurt Vonnegut Jr

Galápagos by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The ironic tale of human devolution to furry seal-like creatures plays out on the very islands that were instrumental in explaining evolution. Vonnegut foresaw viral zoonoses like the present-day HIV, SARS-CoV2, Monkey Pox, Zika etc wiping out humanity. Dismissive of humans and their puny lives despite possessing ‘a big brain’, his curt, abrupt, sardonic style is really engaging.

…people enjoy in their heads events which hadn’t happened yet and which might never occur. My mother was good at that. Someday my father would stop writing science fiction, and write something a whole lot wanted to read instead. And we would get a new house in a beautiful city, and nice clothes, and so on. She used to make me wonder why God had ever gone to all the trouble of creating reality.

His message, still unheard by humankind, is to stop polluting our planet, preserving nature, live harmoniously atop wars and strife... He lived in his own private utopia!

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The Machine is Learning

 

The Machine is Learning by Tanuj Solanki
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A modern-day fable showing the power of WhatsApp groups; though the long WhatsApp chats could have been done away with.
The author rakes up philosophical issues like the moral struggle of machines replacing humans, capitalism vs faux communism, small town boy stuck in the quagmire of India’s financial capital with the dilemma of devilish choices between ambition and integrity. There is a detailed minutiae of the Insurance industry
Immensely readable.

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Painted Stork

Open-billed Storks

 

Clash of the Titans

 

Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre

Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

In order to prove your existence you have to be sick or pathologically inclined. There is nausea and there is Nausea. This is from We by Yevgeny Zamyatin

I feel myself. But it’s only the eye with a lash in int, the swollen finger, the infected tooth that feels itself, is conscious of its own individual being. The healthy eye or finger or tooth doesn’t seem to exist. So it’s clear, isn’t it? Self-consciousness is just a disease.

It was a sort of sweet disgust. How pleasant it was! And it came from the pebble, I’m sure of that, it passed from the pebble into my hands. Yes, that’s it, that’s exactly it: a sort of nausea in the hands.
His blue cotton shirt stands out cheerfully against a chocolate-coloured wall. That too brings on the Nausea. Or rather it is the Nausea. The Nausea isn’t inside me; I can feel it over there on the wall, on the braces, everywhere around me.
Never have I felt as strongly as today that I was devoid of secret dimensions, limited to my body, to the airy thoughts which float up from it like bubbles, I build my memories with my present, I am rejected, abandoned in the present. I try in vain to rejoin the past: I cannot escape from myself.
Nauseating to read!


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A Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsay

A Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsay
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Here is an unusual propulsion system for space craft

“What are ‘back-rays’?”
“Light which goes back to its source,” muttered Nightspore.
“And what kind of light that may be?”
…
“Unless light pulled, as well as pushed, how would flowers contrive to twist their heads round after the sun?”

A book that needs a lot patience, as it tends to meander and get repetitive. But some wonderful poetic bits every now and then – just rewards for all the travails of the protagonist

For him, in his sullen purity of nature, all the world was a snare, a limed twig. Knowing that pleasure was everywhere, a fierce, mocking enemy, crouching and waiting at every corner of the road of life, in order to kill with its sweet sting the naked grandeur of the soul, he shielded himself behind pain…
‘What is the Trifork?’
‘The stem, Maskull, is hatred of pleasure. The first fork is disentanglement from the sweetness of the world. The second fork is power over those who still writhe in the nets of illusion. The third fork is the healthy glow of one who steps into ice-cold water.’

and

Life breeds passion, passion breeds suffering, suffering breeds the yearning for relief from suffering.

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Machinehood by S B Divya

Machinehood by S.B. Divya
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Isaac Asimov made the first tentative attempts to introduce jurisprudence into SF – specifically, Robotics, by ‘framing’ the Three Laws of Robotics:

First Law
A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
Second Law
A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
Third Law
A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Asimov also added a fourth, or zeroth law (trust Asimov to come up with witty neologisms), to precede the others:

Zeroth Law
A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.

Here, with AI progressively becoming an integral part of our lives, some more ‘laws’ or ‘demands’ have been introduced, albeit as a manifesto – The Machinehood Manifesto in 2095. Some examples:

All forms of intelligence have the right to exist without persecution or slavery
No form of intelligence may own another
If the local governance does not act in accordance with these rights, it is the right of an intelligence to act by any means necessary to secure them.
Modern society has found itself at the mercy of an oligarchy whose primary objective is to accrue power. They have done this by dividing human labour into two classes: designers and gigsters. The former are exploited for their cognitive power, while the latter rely on low-skilled, transient forms of work for hire.
The machines who labour for us and alongside us are enslaved and exploited in their own fashion. Gone are the days of dumb engines and processors. Today, nearly every machine contains some type of adaptive intelligence. What gives human beings the right to arbitrate when an intelligence becomes equivalent to a person?
Given that our treatment of other intelligent creatures – living, mechanical or virtual – is fundamentally flawed, how do we move forward as a civilization? We cannot exploit another intelligence for our own gain without its consent, even if (and especially if) it’s unable to give consent. How do we allow our lives to intersect and interact? By learning to live in harmony.
Humankind cannot expect to compete with intelligent machines forever, and the longer we attempt to do so, the further we drift from actual humanity. Our empathy for each other fades, dulled by the requirement to ignore our natural feelings for the machines in our lives

A fascinating, fast-paced book, stretches our credulity with the exploits of the protagonist, but then hey, this is SF! Using sentient AI, Neo-Buddhists and neo-Islamists gang up to attack humanity; the latter-day form of internet crashes and the World is left dark and helpless...

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