Not that we do good to make people feel obliged, but often the outcomes are surprising. We always extend a helping hand — in monitory terms and other ways — whenever we can, to people who need help. For instance, we got Vasudha’s previous maid (around 15 years) admitted to a school. My wife went with her, met with the principal, and bought books and dresses for her. When she was caught letting our daughter eat mud in the play ground (our daughter was around 3 then and the maid was simply looking at her while she ate the mud — Alka saw it from the balcony) we asked her to leave. Then we thought, well, let us give her another chance, as she had just started going to the school (she used to come to our place after her school and still we paid for the entire day) and we thought it’d be very bad for her to leave. So we called her back while she was leaving.

In the evening her mother came and said her daughter was not going to work for us as we had yelled at her. Although we told her the reason, she said no. Then my wife told her that her behavior was totally uncalled for, especially when we had got her daughter admitted to a school and we were still worried for her schooling despite how nasty she had acted. Her reply: I never asked you to get her admitted.

Although it never crossed our minds that they should feel grateful or something, but by this we were totally caught off guard.

Similarly there have been many incidents in which we were simply trying to help people and instead of acknowledging they simply made us feel as if we had to gain something out of it.

So, we’ve been quite confused. Why do people act so nasty even when you are so nice with them? I found a partial answer today while reading “Of Human Bondage” by Somerset Maugham.

Thinking he had done a generous thing, he had expected that Monsieur Ducroz would overwhelm him with expressions of gratitude. He was taken aback to find that the old teacher accepted the present as though it were his due. He was so young, he did not realise how much less is the sense of obligation in those who receive favours than in those who grant them.

“he did not realise how much less is the sense of obligation in those who receive favours than in those who grant them.”

Whether this is right or wrong, it does manage to explain a bit.

Right now, frankly, I have no idea what is the theme of the book and what exactly the author wants to say (I just finished reading page 99). All I can make out is, there are events in your life that can be called "The Black Swans", and they just happen, randomly, and normally their occurrence or non-occurrence is not in your hand. The Black Swans have the ability to change your perception, your life and sometimes they change the world. He uses the discovery of the black swan in Australia as an analogy. Until the black swans were discovered, swans were always thought to be white. Hence, he says we shouldn’t base our knowledge upon the facts we know.

Of course then you start thinking whether the sun is going to come up in the morning or not. The previous history of the world says that it should, but then, who knows?

The author, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, calls himself an empiricist who believes on focusing on how things cannot be done rather than how they can be done. It rather sounds like a negative attitude, but this is the perception perhaps that he wants to change. He says we live in a world defined by our experiences and the events that we remember, and this stifles our ability to see things as they are. I find myself agreeing to this philosophy, as I myself have experienced personal biases due to congealed memories of real and imagined events.

By the end of today’s reading, there’s a portion that explains how, throughout our lives sometimes, we deprive ourselves of multiple smaller happinesses in search of some bigger, elusive (The Black Swan) happiness that happens once in a lifetime. Is it worth it? It depends on how you perceive happiness. May be that bigger, once-in-a-lifetime happiness means more to you than the smaller, everyday happinesses. The problem is, that bigger happiness may or may not happen.

He explains this by terming successes of novels, books, movies, an artist or a scientific discovery as Black Swans. They may change the world, but you’re never sure of their occurrence. Their successes are unexplained. Thousands of better books never see the light of the day. Exceptionally brilliant scientists commit suicides because they are way ahead of their time. Movies that should have been super hits flop. Why? I’m still to read that portion.

This book makes you sleepy unless you’re hell bent upon stretching your reading abilities, or may be I have been simply too tired because I start reading it after I’ve already slogged for 6-7 hours. Lots of abstract philosophy and logic, lots of references to mathematicians and philosophers, their experiments and their observations. The humor sounds clichéd and hence off-putting sometimes, like repeatedly making fun of the French, the bankers and the financial forecasters. Nonetheless, I have found some worthy nuggets of wisdom and I plan to finish it in the coming days.

I wonder why in this list of the 7 most impressive libraries from throughout history there is no Indian library.

I did some research and there were definitely some great libraries at the universities of Takshasila, Nalanda, Vikramshila and Kanchipuram. Of course libraries, especially during the ancient times, took decades, and even centuries to gain a stature, and they were among the first places to be burned down during an invasion. May be the Indian rulers and other influential people were always busy building mega temples so they never spared a thought for libraries and books, although some really great literature was being written throughout the history.

But then Nalanda was one of the first and the biggest centers of teaching in the world, back in the 5th century B.C. So may be people in India believed in disseminating information and sowing seeds of knowledge instead of hoarding it. Please share in the comments section what you know of great and ancient Indian libraries.

Suvro corrected the time and a few details about Nalanda university in the comments sections (thank you!). He wrote:

Oh, I think there’s a factual mistake regarding dates in your blogpost: Nalanda, to the best of my knowledge, grew out of a few villages donated to some Buddhist scholar/monks by a late Gupta king sometime in the 6th century A.D., not B.C.

I’m happy I was able to finish Murakami’s “Kafka on the Shore” during the weekend – 90% of it – the remaining I read on Monday and Tuesday, after doing my work. Reading books is quite challenging for me because I cannot do reading as a side activity. It has to be full-throttle, without interference; I even tend to switch my phone off when I’m reading. I don’t like baroque spells of reading.

This is the reason why I’ve read so little in the past few years. In fact it’s been more than 10 years. Not that I read 100s of books before that, it’s just that, whenever I read, I could just go on reading without interruption. In the past 10 years I must have hardly read 20 books.

I did most of my reading in the late 80s and the early 90s when I was always busy minding my own business. I had a small study table by the bedroom window, and the comers and goers were perpetually greeted by my back, as I was always reading, sitting on that table, with my back to the door. I won’t claim those were the best days of my life (in fact during a later binge-reading period I was about to kill myself) but yes, vis-a-vis book reading, those were. I got introduced to Garcia, Salman Rushdie, Umberto Eco and Dostoyevski during that period.

I’m not complaining about why I don’t read much now. In fact I can easily say this is the happiest – although strained sometimes due to constantly periods of illness – period of my life. But if I can incorporate reading too, nothing like it. My problem is that I cannot read while I’m doing something else. Reading demands total devotion, I respect the book I’m reading and it cannot be something I’m “also doing”. I mean, I cannot read for 30 minutes or 40 minutes a day and complete a book in a week. I’ve never read a book just before going to bed, or while I’m waiting to do something else.

Book reading, I just re-realized, is essential for me if I want to do some serious writing. Recently Alka and I were going through some of my very old documents and she was genuinely amazed to see how I used to write. Ever since we met she’s seen me doing professional content writing or technical writing; she’s read a few of my literary works, but it was for the first time I showed her one of the novels I was working on before I stopped writing fiction. While going through the first few pages, I realized, once again, that the only thing that truly makes me happy is writing fiction, and reading helps me segue into that mode. I once read Vikram Seth’s interview in which he said he doesn’t read books because it affects the way he writes (incidentally, I’ve never read him), and I would like to read precisely for this reason. All the writers I avidly read are or were voracious readers and I feel if you want to write, you need to be able to read too, and this applies to every art and science.

So hopefully I’ll be spending the coming weekends reading some great books. Next weekend I plan to read Ulysses. I’ve been trying to read it for a long time, but somehow, couldn’t go beyond a few pages due to its size, and language. But after reading “Kafka on the Shore” I’m feeling quite encouraged. I’ll be writing more about my reading and writing experience. In the coming days I’ll also be posting a few of my older writings.

Roots was sent to me by my dear sister who in turn was given this book by her friend Mukta. Just as it happens with every book that knocks at the doors of my existence, it stood outside for a long time before I opened the door.

Roots is one of those books that change your perspective of how you treat life and people, although I firmly believe that every kind of book possesses this monumental ability. That’s why I cannot read books piecemeal; they affect me a lot. There are a very few books that I have read, and almost every book has left its imprints upon my consciousness.

I wouldn’t call Roots a "literary experience"; it’s a journey, it’s a part of life that you spend with people struggling to survive through inhumanity, injustice, and existential void. It’s a story about how you sustain the warmth of life in the icy caverns of hopelessness so that even if individuals perish, generations survive. After having a child, I know what this means.

Roots is a story of a Mandinka warrior named Kunta Kinte from the Gambia, Africa, who is captured by slave traders, shipped to America under the most base conditions you can imagine as a human being, and then sold to further, interminable sufferings. His jungle instinct makes him run again and again and every time he is captured until his hope begins to fade like a twilight star. You can really feel the crushing of the soul. Here’s a human being full of dreams, knowledge and plans. He is sensitive, religious and philosophical. He has great plans for himself, his family and his village. He is healthy and strong and a trained warrior. And then he is captured, kept like a rat in a sewage wallowing in his own excreta and vomit and disease, beaten again and again, and chained in such a manner that he cannot even lie straight. Once bought, he is kept tied to a poll outside the house like a dog.

Slaves were kept like animals and in fact, worse than animals. Their white captors hated them with great severity. They were not supposed to have human feelings and needs. If you were a slave, total surrender was expected of you and even that too was considered your duty. You were to feel thankful if you were not beaten and humiliated even if you were loyal to your master. People were sold just like chicken. Your husband, wife, parent, sibling, child, friend, could be sold away any day and you could do nothing about it. Sometimes children were auctioned even before they were born. Anything could be done to your loved ones in front of your eyes and you could not intervene because if you did, your master could punish you in whatever way he wanted to, according to the law. Baffling? For the American whites it was as normal as eating chicken.

So under these conditions Kunta Kinte survives and gives rise to this epic story spanning many generations.

[tags]roots[/tags]

Book lovers say that they have an emotional bonding with their books and they don’t prefer digital book readers. I love books; I don’t read them much but I do love them and I am possessive about them. I don’t like people taking away my books and try to get them back if I can. Still, if all the books are taken away from me and instead I am given an e-book reader in which I can digitally store all the books that I have and all the books that I can possibly read or refer to I won’t hesitate even for a single second.

I agree that books have an old world charm and nothing can compare to sitting in a cozy corner reading a beautifully written book. But books waste lots of paper. millions of trees are chopped off everyday to publish books and newspapers and paper, of course. I wouldn’t like so many trees being cut just because you “love” the feel of a real book in your hands.

As far as I know digital e-book readers are not only very easy to use they are also eco-friendly. Right now they are quite costly but I hope very soon their prices will come down. They are constantly working on developing technology that will produce near paper-thin screens so that you will feel like as if you are holding a paper and not a digital appliance. They won’t strain your eyes and you will be able to roll them and put them in your pocket.

So all those great libraries should be emptied of the priceless books they contain? I would say yes. The books begin to rot after a certain period. If they are digitally saved they will be preserved for countless future generations unless an unforeseen catastrophe destroys them. I’m not saying that we should destroy the libraries; they can still be used for reading and researching which is not possible anywhere else.

I haven’t written here for a long time; I want to write but have no idea what to write about so I’ll write about random things that have been happening in the world.

Taslima Nasreen

I’ve been reading the small news snippets for many days that the central government is making an all-out effort to make life hell for the author whose misfortune is that she has decided to take refuge in India. I wonder why she is still here when she can get shelter in some other, more liberal and democratic country. First she was thrown out by the West Bengal government and now the central government is putting pressure on her to keep a very low profile if she wants to remain in the country. She has been in a virtual house arrest — she cannot go anywhere, nobody can visit her, she cannot call anybody, and nobody can call her. Of course she has contacted every newspaper and TV news channel to pour out her heart and our external affairs minister was looking really upset when he talked to the reporters regarding how she is not heeding to the government’s advisory.

What stumps every freethinking person in the country is how the complete government machinery can be cowed down by a handful of fundamentalists? If nothing else then to just prove a point she should have been provided full security and she should have been allowed to move unrestricted. Why should the fundamentalists decide how a person should live in our country? It is utterly shameful for a country as big as India. We want to have the independence of possessing the nuclear warheads but we cannot ensure safety of a single person; isn’t it ironic?

IT people in Bangalore

A few months ago the people in Bangalore had a big problem with the poor street dogs and now they have a problem with the people working in the IT industry. The last week’s issue of the Outlook magazine talks about how the Bangaloreans hate the way the outsiders are sullying the original culture of the city. I think they should be left alone and all the other people and dogs should move out of the city. For all you know it could turn out to be a matter of life and death. Is it some city in India or Saudi Arabia/Iraq?

Shooting in Gurgaon

Recently two teenagers shot dead their classmate in a Gudgaon school. They were both I think 14-year-old and the main culprit had stolen his father’s revolver who in turn had been given the revolver by a neighbor who in turn, I think, had obtained the weapon illegally. I’m sure a lot has been written about the gun culture arriving in India and the teenagers emulating their American counterparts. Just like in America, the problem is not with the guns, it is with the society, the screwed up societal fabric that we are weaving. The father of the boy had himself taught him how to use the firearm. Violence is constantly glamorized and justified in the media especially in films and on television. I recently realized how immune we have grown to violence around us when they showed a Sri Lankan woman entering an office and blowing herself up. I wasn’t shocked for even a second. Perhaps I have seen too much blood and gore on TV. But yes in many cases the availability of the weapon makes a big difference; the unfortunate boy would have been alive had the other boy had no access to the gun.

In this particular case the other problem was the bully culture; it is said that the dead boy used to bully the boys who shot him. I think bullying should be taken very seriously both by the school authorities and the parents and the children should be taught how to handle bullies without resorting to catastrophic means because by the end of the day you want a reformed bully and not a dead bully.

The recent movie we watched

A couple of weeks ago we watched “Om Shanti Om”. It is a movie you wouldn’t want to spend your money on, I mean it is not dull but it is not a well-made movie considering who all have acted in it. Deepika Padukone is a stunner as long as she doesn’t act and Shahrukh Khan looks stupid throughout the movie. They have tried to make fun of the stars of the 70s era but they have only succeeded in making a pathetic show of themselves. The script is drab, the acting is boring, and even the direction is immature.

This reminds me — a few days ago I was watching a Rajendra Kumar song and was just wondering how old those actors used to look: he always looked like a hero in his 30s and he often acted like one and that made him look graceful. Watch “Sangam” to know what I mean; the two male heroes and the heroine all look so mature. These days our heroes cross their 40s and still act like demented teenagers. But I would quickly like to add here that actors nowadays are far better than their older counterparts as far as the acting skills go.

My reading

For many months — yes, now it takes not days, not weeks, but months — I have been reading “The Count of Monte Cristo” by Alexandre Dumas, an exceptional 19th-century French author. It is a big book, I mean, you can easily fit three novels in the amount of paper and text the book has used. In fact, while reading it I switched to another book “The Inheritance of Loss” by Anita Desai, and for a change I read the book almost in a single day. I wonder why “The Inheritance of Loss” got the Booker — it is nowhere near the other Booker books that I have read for instance, “The God of Small Things” by Arundhati Roy and “The Midnight’s Children” by Salam Rushdie. Maybe they didn’t have a better writer this time.

Coming back to “The Count of Monte Cristo”: it’s basically a revenge saga, and I’m not reading it because I’m in love with the protagonist and the plot. I’m simply reading it because the author has written it exceptionally well and with lots of detail. He has turned his protagonist, the Count of Monte Cristo into a preternatural genius who falls into a mammoth fortune by chance. Okay, not completely by chance but still it sounds quite tedious sometimes. The plot moves very fast and the person who has written the introduction has rightly called Dumas the John Grisham of that time.

I haven’t been reading much newspaper these days because after getting up I’m always in a hurry to do my vocal music practice and after that I start working.

Should religious faith be unshakeable? Faith should never be blind, and this implies you cannot have faith without having true knowledge, as Gautam Buddha urged his followers to always ask questions and only believe when you really understand.

In a recent book (consisting of private letters) on Mother Teresa it’s been revealed that she suffered from doubts for long periods and she shared these doubts in her letters to her friends and as confessions. They are termed as periods of darkness where her faith shook and she doubted the existence of God. Of course she was tormented by her thoughts.

In a letter to a spiritual confidant, the Rev. Michael van der Peet, that is only now being made public, she wrote with weary familiarity of a different Christ, an absent one. “Jesus has a very special love for you,” she assured Van der Peet. “[But] as for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great, that I look and do not see, — Listen and do not hear — the tongue moves [in prayer] but does not speak … I want you to pray for me — that I let Him have [a] free hand.” [ the TIME link ]

But I think these thoughts are normal. She saw so much misery around her and for how long can one see Jesus among people ridden with wounds of leprosy? For how long can you embrace appalling misery to experience God, especially when you love those miserable people? For how long can you condone God? How do you make sense of all this? And sometimes when you cannot make sense of all this, doubts are natural.

Does this mitigate Mother Teresa’s aura as a spiritual, saintly person? I don’t think so. She could have easily kept her “darkness” wrapped inside her but she didn’t. She shared it with people. She sought answers, and I think that’s what real religion means: to seek answers. Religion doesn’t mean parroting hymns and prayers without understanding them. When you have doubts it means you actively think about your faith and you take it seriously, you respect it and you are concerned about it. Well-meaning doubt makes you a greater person, not a lesser person. In fact most of the religious fanaticism and fundamentalism surfaces when you cease to have religious doubts.

[tags]mother teresa[/tags]

As they say, if one door closes, many open. At least there will be some relief for him now. The Salman Rushdie – Padma Laxmi divorce was bound to happen, sooner or later. She always looked like a pile-on and Rushdie always looked bored in her company. Although some say that Rushdie is being dumped by Padma Laxmi, I think this is a good thing happening to him. Just imagine all the cockroaches fleeing away without you having to do anything.

She married him purely to use him as a career ladder and he did in fact help her at every stage. But if there is no talent, if there is no ability, no power in the world can help you succeed. I think finally she realized that he has done all he could have done and now there is no utility value in staying with him, fame and all. And she doesn’t seem to be losing much time.

If Salam Rushdie is feeling sad, he should use this sadness as an inspiration for his next book, write it, and get on with life.

[tags]salman rushdie, padma laxmi, rushdie divorce[/tags]

Update [June 19, 2007]: Rushdie knighthood ‘justifies suicide attacks’:

The award of a knighthood to the author Salman Rushdie justifies suicide attacks, a Pakistani government minister said today.

“This is an occasion for the 1.5 billion Muslims to look at the seriousness of this decision,” Mohammed Ijaz ul-Haq, religious affairs minister, told the Pakistani parliament in Islamabad. “The west is accusing Muslims of extremism and terrorism. If someone exploded a bomb on his body he would be right to do so unless the British government apologises and withdraws the ‘sir’ title.”

Someone should kick their ass and tell these assholes that nothing justifies suicide attacks. If they are so much repulsed by Salman Rushdie or what he has written in his book, they should come up with a counter book. They should write their own version of The Satanic Verses and let the world know what was wrong with the original book. But then that’s a tougher task than blowing up people. Any moron can blow himself or the others up.

Update ends

Salman Rushdie has been knighted. And Iran obviously has a problem with that. Ah! The Muslims of the world have been downright insulted.

Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammad Ali Hosseini said the decision to grant Britain’s highest honor to Rushdie, who wrote the controversial novel “The Satanic Verses,” was an insult to the Muslim world.

“Awarding a person who is among the most detested characters in the Islamic society is obvious proof of anti-Islamism by ranking British officials,” said Hosseini during his weekly press conference.

Calling him “Sir Salman Rushdie” seems strange as he has always sounded sort of anti-establishment. It makes you sad when your idol is blemished, tarnished by colonial titles and he feels proud of it:

“I am thrilled and humbled to receive this great honor, and am very grateful that my work has been recognized in this way,” Rushdie said in a statement.

Salman Rushdie is about to turn 60. I’m sure (or I think I’m sure) he would have politely refused the title, although “honored all the same”, had he been in his 30s or 40s. By the age of 60 such titles and nomenclatures begin to matter.

 My natural reaction was “Yikes!”, but then I thought, this is a country’s way of appreciating a person’s contribution to a particular field, literature in this case. But the problem is, the person permanently becomes “Sir”. You are always Sir This and Sir That and by the dint of this “Sirness”, you are always tied to a British title. This is something that nags me. For instance, I agree to what this link says:

Britain has an absurd, out-dated, elitist, imperial, patronising and hugely loved and revered honours system. Twice a year or so, the Queen publishes a list of the great and not so great who have been awarded what is technically known as a gong – a peerage, a knighthood and various forms of orders, medals and companions of the British Empire. The liberal establishment tends to sneer and there’s probably a real element of honours in exchange for political favours delivered – and even sometimes the sniff of money playing a part. But nonetheless, the recipients – the real ones who deserve their recognition – by and large appreciate it.

You can read a small profile of his illustrious writing career at the BBC website.

More links on Salman Rushdie being knighted:

• Britain defends knighthood as criticism grows
• The Salmanic Verses: Knighthood For Salman Rushdie
• Salman Rushdie: from fatwa recluse to knighted socialite
• Congratulations, Sir Salman

[tags]salman rushdie, salman rushdie knighted, salman rushdie honoured, sir salman rushdie[/tags]