Tag: Non-Fiction

“A Place to Stand” by Jimmy Santiago Baca

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A brutally honest memoir by a person born to deprivation and abandonment. Born in the southern state of New Mexico to parents of Mexican and Apache Indian descent, Baca’s early life is the very antithesis of the American dream. This book enables you to see the indifferent face of America, the very existence of which many in the developing world are unaware. Poverty in America? Don’t tell me! Here is a man lucky enough to be born in America and yet living a most horrendous and nightmarish existence from early childhood to adulthood. “I’d begun to feel early on that the state and society at large considered me a stain on their illusion of a perfect America. In the American dream there weren’t supposed to be children going hungry or sleeping under bridges.”

Baca and his two siblings were abandoned in childhood by both parents – their father drifting through life in an alcoholic haze and their mother eloping to California with a lover in her quest for a more settled lifestyle. Brought up by their grandparents for a while, the children keep yearning for their parents’ return. When their grandfather passes way, the boys are sent to an orphanage. Baca runs away again and again – and ends up in a detention center at the age of thirteen. From there, he moves on to street life marked by vagrancy, aimlessness, petty crimes, intermittent jail terms, violence and substance abuse, for a while reuniting with his brother and then losing him again. “And somewhere along the line, I started fighting just for the sake of fighting, because I was good at it and it felt good to beat other people up.”

Baca is sentenced for drug peddling and ends up in jail. During his five-year incarceration at a maximum security prison, he learns to read and write. He attained real literacy only when he was in his early twenties – and it turned out to be his path to salvation. While he speaks of the sub-human conditions that prevail in prison, something that the vast majority of us cannot even imagine, his language espouses a dark beauty and is more poetry than prose. “The rage that came out of him was the kind of rage that transcends friendship. It’s the kind of rage that can be created only in prison. The seeds of that rage are nourished by prison brutality and fertilized by fear and the law of survival of the fittest. It grows and grows, hidden deep in souls that have died from too many beatings, too many jail cells, and bottomless despair, contained like a ticking bomb.”

Of life in jail, he has this to say, “Three meals a day and a warm cot with a roof over my head was a vacation. It was often better in jail than on the streets; I didn’t have to worry for a while about surviving.” And “Handcuffs had become as normal to me as a wristwatch is to a free man.”

Baca draws plausible portraits of everything that is wrong with a system that recognizes human beings only when there is a perceived need to punish and restrain them. “You could see the narrowing of life’s possibilities in the cold, challenging eyes of the homeboys in the detention center; you could see the numbing of their hearts in their swaggering postures. All of them had been wounded, hurt, abused, ignored; already aggression was in their talk, in the way they let off steam over their disappointments, in the way the expressed themselves. It was all they allowed themselves to express, for each of them knew they could be hurt again if they tried anything different.”

The emotional content of the book is stupendous. It doesn’t come as surprise that Baca soon became an acclaimed writer. He had endured so much and he had so much to say. And most significant of all, he had overcome. Through the world of letters, the human spirit had broken out of the vicious circle of drugs, crime and depravity and settled down to the peaceful pursuit of true happiness. This memoir has the potential to awaken hope in the hearts of people who are going through similar travails and plumbing the depths of despair, not only in America but elsewhere. In the author’s own words, “I was a witness, not a victim. I was a witness for those who for one reason or another would never have a place of their own, would never have the opportunity to make their lives stable enough because resources weren’t available or because they just could not get it together.”

Overall Assessment: Definitely worth reading.

A Place to Stand
AUTHOR: JIMMY SANTIAGO BACA
PUBLISHER: GROVE PRESS, NEW YORK
DATE OF PUBLICATION: 2001

Contributor: Pushpa Kurup lives in Trivandrum, India and works in the IT sector.

“The Last Lecture” by Randy Pausch with Jeffrey Zaslow

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I read ‘The Last lecture’ on a flight from Dubai to New York. The book was published in 2008, the year Randy Pausch died of pancreatic cancer. The fatal diagnosis had come in 2006 and the following year Pausch delivered “The Last Lecture” at Carnegie Mellon on the topic “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams.” Ironically, the speech was part of a series Carnegie Mellon called “The Last Lecture,” where speakers were asked to think about what mattered to them most and give a hypothetical last lecture. Pausch’s speech soon became a sensation on Youtube and the book (supposedly dictated over cellphone to WSJ journalist Jeffrey Zaslow) later turned out to be a New York Times bestseller.

Pausch, a computer scientist and university professor, recognized as a pioneer of virtual reality research, married with three little infants, finds out he has very little time left. This book is his last and final legacy. It is both touching and thought-provoking, leaving the reader sad and elated at the same time. Though it is about death and man’s helplessness in the face of the inevitable, it maintains a humorous vein throughout. Here are a few samples:

  • I quote my father to people almost every day. Part of that is because if you dispense your own wisdom, others often dismiss it; if you offer wisdom from a third party, it seems less arrogant and more acceptable
  • After I got my PhD, my mother took great relish in introducing me by saying: “This is my son. He’s a doctor but not the kind who helps people.
  • Throughout my academic career, I’d given some pretty good talks. But being considered the best speaker in a computer science department is like being known as the tallest of the Seven Dwarfs
  • While I went through treatment, those running the lecture series kept sending me emails. “What will you be talking about?” they asked. “Please provide an abstract.” There’s a formality in academia that can’t be ignored, even if a man is busy with other things, like trying not to die.

The book encompasses many quotable quotes, sound business advice and much wisdom. A few examples:

  • There is more than one way to measure profits and losses.
  • On every level, institutions can and should have a heart.
  • A good apology is like an antibiotic, a bad apology is like rubbing salt in the wound.

Overall Assessment: Definitely worth reading.

The Last Lecture
AUTHOR: Randy Pausch with Jeffrey Zaslow
YEAR OF PUBLICATION: 2008
PUBLISHER: Hodder & Stoughton

Contributor: Pushpa Kurup lives in Trivandrum, India and works in the IT sector.

“The Millionaire Next Door: The Surprising Secrets of America’s Wealthy” by Thomas J. Stanley and William D. Danko

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It’s evident that extensive research has gone into the making of this masterpiece. Thomas J. Stanley studied wealthy individuals for decades before he co-authored this book along with William D. Danko. There are quite a few ‘get rich’ books on the market. This one is undoubtedly special.

The good news is that anyone with a decent job can accumulate a fortune over time. The bad news is that high income does not automatically translate into great wealth. What do the wealthy folks in America have in common? Have they merely inherited a fortune? Not so, say the authors. One thing they all have in common is frugality. We all know of Warren Buffet, but hey, there are dozens of others! And the rich are not who we think they are.

The authors state that affluent persons tend to answer ‘yes’ to three questions they were asked in routine surveys:

  1. Were your parents very frugal?
  2. Are you frugal?
  3. Is your spouse more frugal than you are?

“Most people will never become wealthy in one generation if they are married to people who are wasteful. A couple cannot accumulate wealth if one of its members is a hyper-consumer. This is especially true when one or both are trying to build a successful business. Few people can sustain profligate spending habits and simultaneously build wealth.” So high living is just not cool.

Tighten your belt folks! Take a deep breath. Do you really need that new Lamborghini?

You can also learn new ways of calculating what your net worth ought to be. “Multiply your age times your realized pre-tax annual household income from all sources except inheritances. Divide by ten. This, less any inherited wealth is what your net worth should be.” Check it out. Do you pass the test? No? Then buy another copy of the book and give it to your spouse.

Overall assessment: Wanna become rich? Try this one!

The Millionaire Next Door: The Surprising Secrets of America’s Wealthy
AUTHORS: THOMAS J STANLEY & WILLIAM D DANKO
PUBLISHER: TAYLOR TRADE PUBLISHING
DATE OF PUBLICATION: 2010

Contributor: Pushpa Kurup lives in Trivandrum, India and works in the IT sector.

“The Journey of Man: A Genetic Odyssey” by Spencer Wells

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You are descended from a man who lived in Africa about 59,000 years ago. Do you find this hard to believe or accept? Well, that’s not all. Every other guy living on Planet Earth today is also descended from the same man! Man, wasn’t he a lucky man! The poor savage wouldn’t have imagined this level of success even in his wildest dreams!

How did the descendants of all the other ancients disappear into thin air? And if all of us have a common male ancestor then why do we all look so different? What accounts for our different colors and characteristics? Does race mean anything at all? How did the descendants of this super grandpa spread all over the planet? Where did they go first? How long did they remain in Africa?

This path-breaking book tries to answer all these questions. Earlier studies had revealed that all of us are descended from a single female ancestor (called Mitochondrial Eve) who lived about 150,000 years ago in Africa. Charles Darwin wrote in 1871, “It is therefore probable that Africa was formerly inhabited by extinct apes closely allied to the gorilla and chimpanzee, and as these two species are now man’s nearest allies, it seems somewhat more probable that our early progenitors lived on the African continent than elsewhere.” How right he was!

Today we know that apes lived in Africa some 23 million years ago. We went searching for the so-called ‘missing link’ and we found Homo Erectus, the first stand-up man. We wondered whether some of us are descended from the Neanderthals. We were puzzled about the Java Man, the Peking Man and so many others. It appears now that the Southern Ape is more likely to be our direct ancestor than any of these guys. The oldest genetic lineages are found in people living in eastern and southern Africa.

The sequencing of the human genome provided several answers and threw up just as many questions. Humans were in Australia 50,000-60,000 years ago. They are the only primates on the continent. This means they must have colonized the continent from elsewhere. The DNA trail leads to Africa. Homo erectus never made it to Australia, though they inhabited the island of Java. The aborigines of Australia have a lot in common with the Bushmen of southern Africa. How did homo sapiens travel to Australia so long ago? Did they make boats? Traces left by modern humans in Europe date back to a mere 40,000 years! And Europeans claim they ‘discovered’ Australia! Obviously 21st century humans need to unlearn much that they had learnt.

There is evidence to show that early moderns arrived in India from the south rather than the north. The Dravidian languages are completely unrelated to the Indo-European languages. And DNA markers seem to indicate that the Aryan invasion theory is not without substance.

As early as 1787, Thomas Jefferson wrote, “The resemblance between the Indians of America and the Eastern inhabitants of Asia would induce us to conjecture that the former are the descendants of the latter, or the latter of the former…” We know now that Jefferson had hit the nail on the head. It was across the Bering Strait that modern man came to the new World – and it took him only a thousand years to reach the southern tip of South America. Spencer Wells adds that, “Three-quarters of the large mammals in the Americas were driven to extinction around this time, among them mammoths and horses – the latter weren’t to reappear in the Americas until the Spaniards introduced them in the fifteenth century.”

Overall Assessment: A fascinating read. Biologists, anthropologists, geneticists, truth-seekers, DO READ!

The Journey of Man: A Genetic Odyssey
Author: Spencer Wells
Publisher: Random House
Date of Publication: 2003

Contributor: Pushpa Kurup lives in Trivandrum, India and works in the IT sector.

“What Does It all Mean?” by Thomas Nagel

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This brief book, which intends to provide a very short introduction to philosophy, ends with a chapter on The Meaning of Life and concludes with the sentence, “Life may be not only meaningless but absurd.” This will surely be off-putting to most people, who just cannot imagine the possibility that life as a whole, and their lives in particular, might not have a meaning. If so, why bother to live? What’s the point? A possible answer to this, according to Nagel, is, “There’s no point. It wouldn’t matter if I didn’t exist at all, or if I didn’t care about anything at all. But I do. That’s all there is to it.”

At the outset, I must say that this book is not for anyone who is religious and believes that all philosophical questions are answered by God, that God provides meaning to our lives, that we have souls that are immortal, that there is a heaven to which souls go to after they leave their physical bodies, that we are just instruments in God’s hands, that he is looking out for us, and that our lives have a higher purpose which comes from God. This kind of faith can provide an enormous amount of emotional support throughout life’s trials and tribulations, and people who have this faith are to be envied, but sadly, you cannot force yourself to believe in God any more than you can force yourself to like something you don’t.

Having recently lost someone very dear to me, I skipped to the chapter on Death. So much of what Nagel captures in this chapter resonated with me, especially the idea that there really is no reason to be afraid of death since we did not exist before we were born and will similarly cease to exist after we are dead. So why is non-existence scary? I had prided myself on having this brilliant insight long before I read this book, and while my “delusions of grandeur” have been deflated, I am gratified to see that this idea has also been recognized by others, as was evidenced in this book. Nagel, in particular, captures it very eloquently. Of course, he is talking about how people feel about their own death rather than how people feel about the death of their loved ones. Grief is a part of human make-up, and it would have been helpful to understand what philosophy has to say about it.

I did not find all the chapters as brilliant and compelling as Death and The Meaning of Life. For instance, there is a chapter on Free Will which sort of drags on, is very abstract, does not have any specific conclusion, and on the whole was not particularly insightful. Others in the same vein were the earlier chapters in the book on subjects such as knowledge and knowing, what words mean, and the connection between the body and the mind. On the other hand, the chapter on Free Will provides a good segway into discussing moral questions of Right and Wrong and Justice. If there’s so much in our lives that we cannot control (and some would argue that our sense of controlling anything whatsoever is a complete illusion), does it make sense to talk about morality and punish those who are “immoral”? It’s an ethical dilemma society as a whole has to deal with. There are no easy answers to any of these questions.

What Does It All Mean? is definitely a book that makes us think, and if we are open, to make us question the many assumptions we have about life in general, and our lives in particular.

What Does It All Mean? A Very Short Introduction to Philosophy
Author: Thomas Nagel
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Publication Date: 1987

Contributor: Lachmi Khemlani runs a technology publication in the San Francisco Bay Area.

“Empires of the Indus: The Story of a River” by Alice Albinia

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This first book by a young author made me feel thoroughly ashamed of my ignorance of history. A splendid piece of meticulous research, it ought to be read by every Indian and Pakistani, not to mentions Afghans, Tibetans, and others. The author traces the path and history of the mighty Indus River in an altogether novel narrative, and portrays the lives and aspirations of the peoples who inhabited the lands surrounding it. The book is at once a delightful travelogue, and a superb historical narrative spanning thousands of years. It is serious, yet entertaining, cerebral but not incomprehensible.

Consider these snippets of information:

  1. Islam had a complex relationship with slavery. As in the Bible, slaves were an important part of the Quran’s social system. Mohammed himself sold the Jewish women of Medina into slavery – and the Quran, which has a rule for everything, scripted a strict code regarding their treatment. Slaves were not objects but human beings and they were to be considered a part of the family.
  2. The 10th century Baghdad Caliph had 7000 black eunuchs (and 4000 white ones).
  3. As Islam’s reach into Africa deepened, and the number of black slaves being exported to Arabia increased, so did Arab racism about Africans. Some historians trace this to the revolt by black slaves working in the mines and plantations of Mesopotamia in 883CE.
  4. Arabs imported/exported 2 million sub-Saharan slaves between 900 and 1100.
  5. When the first Muslim-Arab army arrived on the shores of Sind in 711CE, it arrived with plenty of African slaves.
  6. In 1240 Razia Sultan was deposed for having an affair with her Abyssinian (Ethiopian) slave minister Jamaluddin Yaqut, though Razia herself belonged to the ‘Slave Dynasty’ which was of Turkish origin.

All this has to do with slavery but that’s not what the book is about. There’s lots of information about many things, people and events. There are profound sentiments and an overall sense of pathos. The unstated is as powerful as the stated. Babur hunted rhinoceros in the jungles of northern Punjab. (Now the region has no more rhinos.) Ashoka’s edict at Kandahar was scripted in Aramaic and Greek. The land where the Golden Temple of Amritsar stands was donated by Emperor Akbar to the fourth Sikh Guru. (This is fiercely contested.)

Overall Assessment: If you have any intellectual pretensions, do read the book. If you have an interest in history, sociology and the environment, it’s a must-read. Flippant readers, keep away – this book is not for you!

Empires of the Indus: The Story of a River
Author: Alice Albinia
Publisher: John Murray (An Hatchette UK Company)
Date of Publication: 2008

Contributor: Pushpa Kurup lives in Trivandrum, India and works in the IT sector.

“Sahibs’ India: Vignettes from the Raj” by Pran Nevile

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This is a meticulously researched work, yet the author eschews boring details and tells us only what informs and entertains. “In the royal household of the Viceroy, Lord Lytton, there were 300 indoor servants, of whom a third were cooks.” My heart stops, my head spins, my hair stands on end! While we do know that the British in India lived in opulent splendor, the actual details and descriptions are revealing if not shocking. We are left wondering whether the kings and queens of England enjoyed such luxuries as the sahibs did.

The chapters have interesting titles, indicating the shape of things to come: Sex and the Sahib, Memsahibs and the Indian Marriage Bazar, When Sahib was Hooked to Hookah, Nautch Parties, Fun and Frolic in Simla, Shikar and Pig-Sticking, Sadhus, Sufis and Sanyasis, Banning of an Indian Erotic Epic, and so on. “David Ochterlony, the British resident in Delhi (1803) popularly known as ‘Loony Ahktar’, lived like a royal prince and used to take the air in the evening accompanied by his thirteen Indian bibis riding elephants.” Similarly, William Frazer who was the British commissioner in the 1830s maintained seven Indian wives and had several children, who were either Hindu or Muslim depending on the faith of their mothers.

We learn that “The cost of landing a European wife in Calcutta worked out to Rs.5000 – far beyond the means of ordinary company officials. On the other hand, according to Captain Williamson’s Guide book published in 1810, the expenses that had to be incurred on an Indian mistress worked out to Rs.40 per month.” We also learn than white-skinned girls from Eastern Europe and Japan were procured to staff the brothels of Bombay and Calcutta. Robert Clive in the 18th century described Calcutta as “one of the most wicked places in the Universe.” In 1828 there was a general strike by palanquin bearers in Calcutta. Interestingly, all of them were natives of Orissa. The rickshaw was introduced from Japan in the 1880s. The Kumbh Mela at Haridwar attracted pilgrims from China, Persia and Bokhara.

“All accounts emphasize the fact that Muslims celebrated their festivals just like the Hindus, with the same earnestness and ostentation and amused themselves with dance and song and other entertainments, including feast and sports,” the book informs us. Persian songs were as popular in India as Hindi songs until the end of the 19th century. “Tazah ba tazah, nu ba nu”, a ghazal by Hafiz (Shirazi) dominated the nautch scene for over a century. By the early 20th century, thanks to the fervor of the missionaries and the campaigns of the vigilantes, the nautch had fallen out of favour and the nautch girls had faded into oblivion.

The book has several amusing anecdotes. Here’s a sample: As the story goes, Nobel laureate C.V. Raman was once performing religious rituals with offerings of food to his ancestors in Gaya when someone said to him, ‘Sir, you are such a great scientist – how can you believe this food would reach your ancestors? Sir Raman smiled and replied, ‘I cannot prove that it will not reach them.’

The author, Pran Nevile, was born and educated in Lahore and served in the Indian Foreign Service and the United Nations. He has written several books on the British Raj, including Beyond the Veil: Indian Women in the Raj, Rare Glimpses of the Raj, and Nautch Girls of the Raj.

Overall Assessment: Worth reading

Sahibs’ India: Vignettes from the Raj
Author: Pran Nevile
Publisher: Penguin
Publication Date: November 2010

Contributor: Pushpa Kurup lives in Trivandrum, India and works in the IT sector.

“The Travels of Ibn Battuta” by Ibn Batuta (Abridged and Edited by Tim Mackintosh-Smith)

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Travels of Ibn Battutah

“They told me that one of the Hindu infidels had died, that a fire had been kindled to burn him, and his wife would burn herself along with him.” Describing the practice of sati in 14th century Hindustan, Ibn Battuta observes that, “The burning of the wife after her husband’s death is regarded by them as a commendable act, but is not compulsory; but when a widow burns herself her family acquire a certain prestige by it…”

Abu Abdallah Ibn Battuta is undoubtedly the greatest traveller in world history. Born in Tangier, Morocco in 1304, he set out for Mecca and Medina at the age of 22 and returned home a quarter of a century later, having visited much of the old world from Hangzhou in China to Timbuktu in Mali, and traversed an estimated 75,000 miles between 1325 and 1354. On his return he wrote his epic travelogue wherein he mentioned more than 1500 persons by name. Ibn Battuta (that’s his family name) was a Sunni Muslim and a scholar of Islamic jurisprudence.

He described Al Iskandariya (Alexandria) in Egypt as one of the most beautiful places he has ever seen. “Among all the ports in the world I have seen none to equal it except the ports of Kawlam (Quilon) and Qalicut (Calicut) in India……..and the port of Zaitun (Quanzhou) in China.” [Alexandria is still beautiful, but Kollam and Calicut are ports no longer.] Ibn Battuta observed the famed lighthouse of Alexandria (Pharos), one of the wonders of the ancient world, on his outward journey and also on his return. When he saw it for the first time, only one face had been ruined but when he returned in 1349, it had virtually become inaccessible.

At Delhi, Sultan Muhammad bin Tugluq appointed him as Maliki Qadi and he spent six years there, referring to his benefactor as king of Al-Sind and Al-Hind. His description of the Qutub Minar and the metal pillar are revealing. There are some descriptions that would make painful reading for devout Hindus. “At the eastern gate of the mosque there are two enormous idols of brass, prostrate on the ground and held by stones, and everyone entering or leaving the mosque treads on them. The site was formerly occupied by a budkhanah, that is an idol temple, and was converted to a mosque on the conquest of the city.” (Delhi was sacked by Muhammad Ghori in 1192, Prithviraj Chauhan was defeated, and a few years later Qutbuddin Aibak established the Slave Dynasty.)

Of the holy man Shaikh Ala al-Din he wrote, “He preaches to the people every Friday and multitudes of them repent before him and shave their heads and fall into ecstasies of lamentation, and some of them faint.” Sounds familiar? These practices persist even today, but not necessarily in the Islamic world.

“No person eats with another out of the same dish,” Ibn Battuta noted. He also spoke of the Indian habit of eating betel leaves with areca nuts, sprinkling rose water and eating samosas. He recounted the common scenes in the capital, telling us a great deal about life in Delhi in the 14th century. “Every day there are brought to the audience hall hundreds of people chained, pinioned and fettered, and those who are for execution are executed, those for torture tortured, and those for beating beaten.” The shifting of the capital from Delhi to Daulatabd in the Deccan is recounted, probably with a little exaggeration.

Of the Syrian city of Aleppo he said, “The spirit feels in the environs of the city of Halab (Aleppo) an exhilaration, gladness and sprightliness which are not experienced elsewhere, and it is one of the cities which is worthy to be the seat of the Caliphate.” Well, if Ibn Battuta were to see the state of Aleppo today he would just sit down amidst the rubble and weep.

These teeny-weeny tales are just the tip of the iceberg. There’s lots more! Overall Assessment: Very, very interesting.

The Travels of Ibn Battuta
Author : Ibn Battuta (Abridged and Edited by Tim Mackintosh-Smith from the translation by Sir Hamilton Gibb and C F Beckingham)
Publisher: Picador
Date of Publication: December 2002

Contributor: Pushpa Kurup lives in Trivandrum, India and works in the IT sector.

“Switched On: A Memoir of Brain Change and Emotional Awakening” by John Elder Robison

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Switched On

How much of what we are, what we think and feel, and what we do is determined by the “wiring” of our brains? This question is at the heart of Switched On, a fascinating memoir of one man who was a participant in a TMS (transcranial magnetic stimulation) research study conducted at the Neurology Department of the Beth Israel Center, which is a teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School. TMS is a magnetic method used to stimulate small regions of the brain, allowing doctors to change brain activity without surgery or medication. It has been in research and development for over twenty years, which seems like a long time, but is actually quite short in the medical research field, which is why most of us have never even heard of it. I learnt of TMS during a Fresh Air broadcast featuring John Elder Robison, the author of Switched On, and the neurologist, Alvaro Pascual-Leone, who led the TMS study at Beth Israel and worked closely with Robison throughout the time he was receiving TMS. The main reason behind inviting Robison to be a participant in the study was that he has autism, and the researchers wanted to investigate whether a non-invasive technique like TMS could help in any way.

Much of the book is a methodically detailed log of the author’s day-to-day experience with the study, including how he met the researchers, how he was invited to participate, why he agreed, what he was hoping for, the buildup to every session, what happened at every session, and what were the effects that he experienced afterwards. He also shares details about his family, his work, his autism, and the impact that TMS had on different aspects of his life. These details, in and of themselves, are not especially riveting—after all, who wants to know about the mundane details of the day-to-day events in our lives?

What we do want to know, however, is—does it work? Does TMS change our brains and consequently, our emotions and our actions? And if so, are the effects temporary or long-term? And since Switched On is a first-person account of someone who has actually received TMS, we actually get to know the answers to some of these questions. Robison does a terrific job of describing both the short-term and long-terms effects that he experienced after each TMS session, including being much more open to people and experiences, the ability to “read” people a lot better and understand nuances which had earlier escaped him thanks to autism, and even the ability to be moved to tears by a sad story, even if it was just in the newspaper or told to him by someone he had just met. Fortunately, being so overcome with emotion that life becomes difficult was not a long-term effect of TMS. At the same time, having had the experience of empathy and connectedness—however short-lived—provided him with a “knowledge” of these emotions that is helping him to better understand “normal” (non-autistic) people on an ongoing basis.

Of course, Switched On is one person’s account of the effect of TMS, and it’s possible that other participants in the study experienced somewhat different reactions and effects. It would be good to know more, and I hope the TMS researchers can compile their findings not just into research papers for the academic community but also articles and books for the rest of us. It is fascinating to think that everything we think and do—including this thinking!—comes from our brain chemistry. Does this mean that at some point, we will be able to manipulate brains to create “designer thinkers,” similar to how we could potentially manipulate genes to create “designer babies?” Another interesting question, brought to the forefront by Switched On.

Switched On: A Memoir of Brain Change and Emotional Awakening
Author: John Elder Robison
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Publication Date: March 2016

Contributor: Lachmi Khemlani runs a technology publication in the San Francisco Bay Area.

“The Hard Thing about Hard Things: Building a Business When There are No Easy Answers” by Ben Horowitz

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The Hard Thing about Hard Things

This is a must-read book for entrepreneurs, especially those who have wandered the streets looking for venture capital, struggling to manage all aspects of a company while barely being able to make ends meet. The book talks about hiring, management cultures, and styles, lay-offs, selling the company, partnerships, and every possible aspect involving startups.

Most entrepreneurs, especially those who have struggled, should be able to relate to every line in this book. It is very much a “guy’s book written for guys.” The direct in-your-face style makes this book hilarious in parts.

This is the only book that I have ever purchased thrice – first on my Kindle and two hard copies – the second hard copy was intended as a gift for a friend/entrepreneur.

The author, Ben Horowitz, founded Opsware and is now a leading investor based in Silicon Valley.

The Hard Thing about Hard Thing: Building a Business When There are No Easy Answers
Author: Ben Horowitz
Publisher: Harper Business
Publication Date: March 2014

Contributor: Pran Kurup is an author and entrepreneur based in the San Francisco Bay Area.

“The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon” by Brad Stone

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The Everything Store

This is an excellent book for anyone interested in learning more about Amazon and its evolution. It is meticulously researched and gives you a good inside view of Amazon’s culture, Jeff Bezos style – his frugality and ruthlessness.

It is mind-boggling to imagine that a former investment banker (a non-techie) could have built a company with such cutting-edge products and services. It is an excellent book that captures the entrepreneurial spirit and business strategy vis-a-vis Amazon’s success story.

I read this book quite a while back but it remains very much in my memory because it is one of the better business books published in recent times. Hats off to the author, Brad Stone for this outstandoing book.

The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon
Author: Brad Stone
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Publication Date: October 2013

Contributor: Pran Kurup is an author and entrepreneur based in the San Francisco Bay Area.

“Infidel” by Ayaan Hirsi Ali

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Infidel

Everything about this book is shocking. The words are gentle, yet the message is powerful and the story spectacular. It’s an autobiographical account of a woman’s birth in Somalia, growing up in Saudi Arabia, Kenya and Ethiopia, and migrating first to the Netherlands where she is elected to Parliament and then to the United States, where she is on a mission to exorcise the ghosts of Islam.

“We froze the moral outlook of billions of people into the mindset of the Arab desert in the seventh century,” she writes. “We were not just servants of Allah, we were slaves.”

The author’s account of her early life in Somalia is hair-raising. She gives a blood-curling description of her experience of forced circumcision at the age of five, as also that of her elder brother and younger sister, all performed on the same day at the initiative of her maternal grandmother. “Female genital mutilation predates Islam. Not all Muslims do this, and a few of the peoples who do are not Islamic. But in Somalia where virtually every girl is excised, the practice is always justified in the name of Islam.” Though she squarely condemns FGM, she does not ask the question why boys need to be circumcised.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali talks of her stay in Saudi Arabia, where gender based segregation was strictly enforced and public beheadings were commonplace. “It was a normal, routine thing: after the Friday noon prayer you could go home for lunch, or you could go and watch the executions. Hands were cut off. Men were flogged. Women were stoned.” The author points out that the Prophet did say, “Wage war on the unbelievers.” She adds, “Christians can cease to believe in God. But for a Muslim, to cease believing in Allah is a lethal offence. Apostates merit death: on that the Quran and the hadith are clear.”

She prayed five times a day and wore the veil. But soon she began to question her own beliefs. Was her religious instructor Boqol Sawm translating the Quran properly? “Surely Allah could not have said that men should beat their wives when they were disobedient? Surely a woman’s statement in court should be worth the same as a man’s?” She describes her gradual loss of faith, her life in Europe where she learnt that human rights and dignity were cherished values, her outspokenness and the heavy price she had to pay for it, the murder of her friend Theo Van Gogh in the Netherlands, her persecution by religious extremists, and her eventual escape to America, the land of the free.

Today she continues to write and speak out. Fearlessly – but with bodyguards. Her speeches and debates are all over Youtube. As there is a fatwa against her anyway, she can keep writing anything and it can’t get any worse. She says in the Introduction to this book: “People ask me if I have some kind of death wish, to keep saying the things I do. The answer is no: I would like to keep on living. However, some things must be said, and there are times when silence becomes an accomplice to injustice.”

Overall Assessment: Thought provoking. Ayaan Hirsi Ali is possibly one of the most impressive voices of the 21st century.

Infidel
AUTHOR: Ayaan Hirsi Ali
PUBLISHER: The Free Press
Date of Publication: 2007

Contributor: Pushpa Kurup lives in Trivandrum, India and works in the IT sector.

“Goat Days” by Benyamin

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Goat Days

It was the common dream of an average, economically weak Malayalee that drove Najeeb to also forsake all the little that he possessed, to borrow heavily from his kith and kin and to leave for the golden desert sands of the Gulf. Yes, he dearly loved his verdant green patch of land back home, the daily dip in the clear, flowing water of the village river, his Umma’s freshly cooked homely food, his wife Sainu, his group of friends, the simple basic joys of life in the countryside. Marriage, the beginning of a new family and its added responsibilities spurred Najeeb to opt for just a few years in the Gulf and then come back to his village and his folks.

Waiting expectantly, in a milling crowd of hopeful workers like him, at the dusty Saudi airport, watching the different arbabs pick the respective workers onto their new workplaces, noting the crowd gradually dwindling, losing hope, getting despondent, Najeeb at last observes a rickety old vehicle drawing close to him in a cloud of dust, an extremely shabby person alighting, walking up and down the airport a few times, most impatiently, then examining Najeeb’s passport and finally commanding him in brusque tones in Arabic to get into the vehicle.

In that almost unending, bumpy , dusty ride, lasting several hours, across the desert, with not a sight of a single human person in the road, we watch Najeeb’s hopes gradually change to a clammy fear of the unknown. With his passport confiscated, with not a soul other than the arbab driving the vehicle to god knows where, he realizes he is trapped irrevocably.

Najeeb’s maiden journey in what he now sees as the mirage called Gulf, ends in a horribly stinking, filthy goat farm, with hundreds and teeming hundreds of goats for company, with not even the basic necessities, let alone comforts, of life. Najeeb’s simple dreams of a new life in the Gulf get shattered one by one. We watch his gradual acclimatization with the new life, his forced foregoing of the daily routine back home, the sheer, inhuman hours of hard physical labour done even while being exposed to the killing heat of the desert sun during the days and the bone chilling cold during the nights, the minimal food with minimal water, with no human soul to look at and the punishing torture meted to him by his master at every step.

Najeeb’s undying love for life and his desire to live brilliantly shines through, even as he sinks into this dismal hopeless abyss. The typical Malayalee sense of humour gives Najeeb the strength to try and make light of the hopeless trap he has gotten into and helps him in his efforts to learn the new tongue and a smattering of Arab words. Above all, his absolute, steadfast faith in the Almighty at every step after faltering step of this punishing life he lives, gives Najeeb an indefatigable strength to pull on and never admit defeat.

Benyamin’s Malayalam novel Aadu Jeevitham, translated into English as Goat Days, unfolds the story of Najeeb and his life in the goat farm, in the middle of nowhere, and is a shocking revelation of the lives of the likes of several unknown Najeebs living animal lives in similar farms. Benyamin was awarded the Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award in 2009 for this novel. Goat Days makes one ponder on the abject economic misery of a certain group of our own brethren that force them to migrate, of the absolute unscrupulous nature of the agents in our own country that lure such innocent people and throw them into immeasurable scales of suffering in some foreign land. The novel questions us and our complacence that make us turn ourselves away from the knowledge of the actual existence of such inhuman farms of labour. Should such slave farms be permitted to function? Do such similar places exist in our own country? Joseph Koyippally, who has done the translation into English, deserves a special word of mention for bringing this stark, bleak account of an astounding protagonist to a global audience.

Goat Days
Author: Benyamin, Translated by: Joseph Koyippally
Publisher: Penguin Books
Publication Date: June 2012

Reviewer: Uma Rao has a Ph.D. in English Literature with a PG Diploma in Journalism, works for the State Bank of India, and is fond of books, music, theatre, cinema and travel.

“JFK’s Forgotten Crisis: Tibet, the CIA, and The Sino-Indian War” by Bruce Riedel

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JFK's Forgotten Crisis

In 1950, Mao claimed he had ‘liberated’ Tibet. The monks at Lhasa were powerless, the Dalai Lama was 15 years old, and the world ignored the event. Nehru, at the time, had friendly relations with China. The US was understandably nervous about China. Moreover, a subtle power struggle had commenced between Russia and China leaving everyone confused.

The CIA sprang into action, setting up a surveillance operation near Dhaka (in the erstwhile East Pakistan) and flying U2 spy planes over Tibet in the late fifties. They had been doing this from Lahore and Peshawar earlier – until one of their planes was shot down by the Russians. Soon they discovered the Lop Nor nuclear testing facility – and Mao found out about the spy planes. Perhaps he suspected Nehru of complicity as the planes had to cross Indian air space.

The Dalai Lama’s escape in 1959 and the Tibetan resistance were masterminded by the CIA. India gave him asylum and accommodated him at Dharamsala. Meanwhile in Pakistan Ayub Khan came to power in a military coup. India soon discovered that China had built a major highway across the Aksai Chin region which was a part of Kashmir. Nehru demanded China’s withdrawal but Mao stood his ground. From then on, relations between the two countries deteriorated. Nehru’s Forward Policy of pushing forward military outposts in disputed territories in Aksai Chin and the northeast sparked off violent incidents.

In January 1961, John F Kennedy assumed office as President of the United States. He chose John Kenneth Galbraith as Ambassador to India. In time, both men would prove themselves to be true friends of India in her hour of need.

On 17th August 1962, the USSR and India signed a treaty of Peace, Friendship and Cooperation. China invaded India on 20th October 1962. At that precise moment, JFK was grappling with the Cuban missile crisis as the world came to the brink of nuclear war. Khrushchev was too busy to worry about India. Mao reportedly told him about his plans to attack India and the Russian didn’t bother to warn Nehru. (The treaty and his personal rapport with Nehru mattered little.) Khrushchev played a game with Fidel Castro as well, assuring Kennedy he would withdraw the nuclear warheads from Cuba, without consulting or informing Castro. It’s almost certain that Khrushchev had not told Mao about the nuclear missiles he had positioned in Cuba. Looks like he managed to fool everyone – except Kennedy.

Well, China grabbed Aksai Chin. And on 27th October, the hostilities ceased. The following day Khrushchev made a deal with Kennedy agreeing to remove the missiles from Cuba. The world breathed a sigh of relief. Nehru, however, had to eat humble pie, abandon his policy of nonalignment and send an SOS to Kennedy.

Washington’s response was swift and decisive. Besides Galbraith, the British and Canadian ambassadors in New Delhi appealed to their respective governments to join the effort to defend India. On 1st November, the USAF and RAF began airlifting arms and ammunition. Kennedy dispatched a high-level delegation to India. Ayub Khan demanded a slice of Kashmir as an inducement for staying out of the conflict. Kennedy, egged on by Galbraith, told him ‘don’t you dare’.

China attacked again on 16th November. The Indian army was completely routed on the north-eastern front and the narrow Siliguri corridor linking Assam, Nagaland Manipur and Tripura with the rest of India was on the verge of capture. India suffered heavy casualties. Thousands were taken prisoner, including Brigadier J P Dalvi who later wrote “Himalayan Blunder” castigating Nehru, Defence Minister Krishna Menon and Army Chief B M Kaul for their multiple follies. Indian politicians stayed away from the war zone. Indira Gandhi visited Tezpur near the Chinese frontline on 19th and 20th November. On 1st December China unilaterally withdrew from the occupied territories in India’s north-eastern sector. However, the Chinese held on to Aksai Chin. The war ended as abruptly as it had started.

Did Kennedy call up Mao and issue an ultimatum? Or was Mao dissuaded by the American response? It was revealed later had Mao had been making preparations for this assault for several years, building roads, infrastructure, and even POW camps along the border. Kennedy’s intervention undoubtedly saved India from dismemberment. His statesmanship during the Cuban missile crisis saved the world from Armageddon.

The following year the young president was assassinated in Dallas. Six months later Nehru died. In 1965 Pakistan attacked India and after 23 days of intense fighting, agreed to a ceasefire. Mao did not help Ayub Khan and his Defence Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto who made several visits to China to seek help. During the 1971 Indo–Pak war that culminated in the liberation of Bangladesh, China remained aloof, despite some prodding by Nixon and Kissinger. Senator Edward Kennedy on the other hand visited India in August 1971, toured the refugee camps in Bengal and deplored that American weapons had facilitated the massacre in East Pakistan. By the time the Kargil conflict erupted in 1999, India’s nuclear capability was no secret – and naturally China refused to get involved.

Bruce Reidel has done a decent job of analyzing data from various sources and drawing plausible conclusions. The book leaves us wondering if the fate of Asia would have been different if Kennedy had lived just a while longer.

Overall Assessment: Eminently readable – and historically valuable.

JFK’s Forgotten Crisis: Tibet, the CIA, and The Sino-Indian War
AUTHOR: BRUCE RIEDEL
PUBLISHER: Bookings Institution Press.  (HarperCollins India in 2016)
PUBLICATION DATE: November 2015

Reviewer: Pushpa Kurup lives in Trivandrum, India and works in the IT sector.

“Castro’s Secrets- Cuban Intelligence, the CIA and the Assassination of John F Kennedy” by Brian Latell

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Castro's Secrets

Did Fidel Castro mastermind the assassination of John F Kennedy? This book by a CIA veteran throws new light on the mystery. The author gives details about the assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, his adoration of Castro, his failed attempt to migrate to Cuba, his brief sojourn in the Soviet Union, and a host of other clues that serve to deepen the mystery rather than provide open-and-shut answers.

In June 1987 when Florentino Aspillaga Lombard sought asylum at the American embassy in Vienna, his spectacular revelations about Cuba’s clandestine operations sent shock waves through American intelligence circles. How terribly the CIA had underestimated this impoverished Caribbean island! Lombard was no ordinary spy. He had in July 1979 played a crucial role in ensuring of the victory of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. He had been in Angola where Castro had engineered a Marxist revolutionary takeover. He provided the CIA with a goldmine of information. Cuban intelligence had knowledge about the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961. No wonder it turned out to be such a disaster! It comes as no surprise that the head of Cuban intelligence was Fidel himself.

Through the book, we get a rare glimpse of Castro’s spectacular intelligence network. We also glean interesting details of the now well-known Armageddon Letter of 1963 where Castro urged Nikita Khrushchev to launch a nuclear attack on the USA, the role played by Cubans in fomenting revolution elsewhere in the Americas, and the impressive scale of training and indoctrination provided to wannabe revolutionaries. Latell opines that Che Guevara’s Bolivian venture was a suicidal mission. As he puts it, “Fidel always thought strategically, many moves ahead, like a grand master moving pieces on a giant chess board. Venezuela was an opponent’s queen, Bolivia a pawn. …..If by some fluke, Guevara were to win, he, Fidel, could take credit for sponsoring and masterminding the victory. And if the roving Argentine incendiary were to die in the quest, that would reverberate even more enduringly. Cuba would have a martyred patron saint.”

Latell also suggests the possibility that Hugo Chavez or his elder brother, Adan, could have been spotted and recruited by Cuban intelligence long before the former won power in Venezuela. How else could a career military officer become an adoring disciple of the leader of another country?

Overall Assessment: Must read! History, politics and intrigue make a deadly cocktail!

TITLE: Castro’s Secrets- Cuban Intelligence, the CIA and the Assassination of John F Kennedy
AUTHOR: Brian Latell
PUBLISHER: PALGRAVE MACMILLAN
DATE OF PUBLICATION: 2012

Reviewer: Pushpa Kurup lives in Trivandrum, India and works in the IT sector.