On spines and meditation

Is there anything more meditative than organising a bookshelf? My child loves to arrange her books by colour. The red spined ones first, then the orange, all the way upto violet to make a rainbow of book spines. Sometimes she makes mountains, alternating the tiny valleys of baby board books with the peaks of the thicker nighttime books, some plateaus thrown in here and there for good measure. 

I myself like to mix it up. Some days I would obsessively organise books by genre. Those are the days when I would take a dim view of a Wodehouse nestling against Wolfhall (Alphabetic justice, but ludicrous). On other days, when no one is looking, I turn whimsical about my bookshelf. My prized Calvin and Hobbes can snuggle up with The Clash of Civilisations. The Principal Upanishads are standing shoulder to shoulder with Principles of Corporate Finance. Zia Mody’s little tome of key judgements is quietly leaning in to What the Ladybird heard. Feeling particularly impish, I even let Piketty’s Capital rub shoulders with Liar’s Poker. 

Then I carefully reorganise it before anyone can see me - a bookshelf that’s not severely and painstakingly organised by subject is shockingly out of character, bound to startle those who (think they) know me. It’s a secret, guilty meditative pleasure that I share only with my books. Don’t tell anyone 😉 📕

How do you meditate? 

Pandemics and POTUS

It’s the start of an eventful century.

 Barely two decades into the century, sweeping changes have taken place in technology and connectivity. Asian heft is on the rise. The world has witnessed many wars and a global upsurge of nationalism. And then, a pandemic rages through the world, affecting people across continents. Even the most powerful man in the world is not spared.

Sounds familiar? It is strange that it does, for the year I am talking about is 1918.

The Great War is about to come to an end. The US President Woodrow Wilson’s famous “Fourteen Points” speech convinced Germany to put an end to the War and come to the negotiating table, raising hopes of an enduring peace, and a Treaty without punitive clauses.

Germany’s traditional rival, France was baying for blood… but it was widely thought that Wilson would prevail over France’s Clemenceau and broker a fair Treaty.

The Fourteen Points were widely circulated and this cartoon of Wilson (from Punch) moving with a sense of purpose, exuding firmness and capability, captures how he managed to infuse hope for a just peace, projecting the image of the American warrior arriving in Paris to settle the knotty problems of the warring Europeans.

And so, the Fourteen Points became the basis of Armistice in 1918.

But then came the twist in the tale…

Woodrow Wilson came down with the then-raging pandemic, the Spanish Flu. He was never the same again. He was left physically weak and disoriented. He was no longer the man of purpose that Punch so hopefully portrayed. He lost the ability to argue with Clemenceau and he gave in to the French demands, resulting in a Treaty that sought to punish and humiliate, rather than set the tone for a new, peaceful world order.

The heavy reparations, the insertion of a clause on War Guilt, French occupation of German territory… and the sense of betrayal and outrage that the Germans were left with… the consequent rise of National Socialism…these are only too well-documented.

And we all know how badly it ended.

History throws up villains and we rush, often rightly so, to be outraged by their actions and seek to ensure that villainy of that sort doesn’t rear its head again. But those villains are the product of the circumstances that came together to create them. We may choose to believe that no circumstances extenuate what followed, in this case. But we must not forget those circumstances either.

We fixate on and are appalled by the hideousness of the actions of the villains produced by history, and not so much on the events that led to the rise of such a persona. If only we could learn more from the milieu of history than from personalities of history, we may achieve more success in ensuring that kind of history doesn’t repeat itself.

Would there have been no WW2 if Woodrow Wilson had not been affected by the ‘flu? Would there have been a just and enduring peace? Would the League of Nations have been an institution to reckon with rather than the toothless one it turned out to be?

Hard to say.

But a compelling counter factual to consider.

Book Review: Pachinko

 

 

 

Pachinko: a Japanese pinball game that is wildly popular, that spawned an economic behemoth to rival any major industry. An industry that is dominated by ethnic Koreans in Japan. And when the Pachinko parlours are frowned upon because of (real or imagined) links to the yakuza gangsters, it taints all the ethnic Koreans by association. Yet they cannot escape this spiral: they got in to this business because other avenues of employment were not open to people of their ethnicity. Pachinko: a metaphor for the “damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t” predicament of immigrants who are treated as second class citizens. This metaphor is uniquely applicable in this case, but the inescapable tragedy is that parallels abound around the world.  

Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko is a well-researched saga of immigration, exile and hyphenated identities. The tales of Korea’s annexation by Japan and the excesses of the world wars, the division of Korea, and the subsequent wars: these are all well-known to students of history. But what of the stories of ordinary people caught in these times of great upheaval?

The author has woven this novel seamlessly into the fabric of the 20^th century: starting from a humble fishing family in Busan in the South of unified Korea, a chance encounter with a Korean wholesale trader which ties their fortunes to a family from the North, and a resulting immigration to Osaka. This cements the family’s identity as Korean-Japanese, a hyphenation that proves definitive to the course of the story. Persecution and discrimination are constant, though they change garb as generations shift; but just as constant and is the will to survive and thrive. The female characters are found saying more than once, “A woman’s lot is to suffer. We must suffer.” Yet, these women are no damsels-in-distress; they in fact are the prime movers of this tale: whether it is finding a way out of financial ruin by sheer enterprise and dogged determination or making critical decisions whenever the men, bogged down by the weight of tradition are found wanting. Not all of them are martyrs either, and the book stands out in the way it deftly projects changing social mores, building an appreciation for the rapidly evolving role of women across generations.

This novel has a rich and well-crafted cast of characters across four generations, covering the breadth of ideology, religion, aptitude and aspirations.  Take the case of Solomon, the son of a second-generation Korean immigrant in Japan.  His father Moazasu rose from debilitating poverty and crushing life events, going on to build a fortune in the Pachinko business, managing to realise a much-cherished dream of educating his son in the United States. But does education help Solomon make a clean break from his Pachinko-linked past, making the question of immigrant identity a thing of the past? Even when he seems to have lost all he worked for to petty racist stereotyping, Solomon refuses to paint all members of the oppressor community with the same brush, even as he demands the same for his own community.

Then there his uncle Noa, who makes a startling realization about those who claim to accept him despite his background and origins:  “…seeing him as only Korean—good or bad—was the same as seeing him only as a bad Korean. She could not see his humanity, and Noa realized that this was what he wanted most of all: to be seen as human.”

I will carry this moment of Noa’s realization with me: isn’t this what our struggles are ultimately about? To be free from stereotypes of gender, race, religion... To be seen as human.

 

 

Book Review: Three Daughters of Eve

Three Daughters of Eve  by Elif Shafak

Book Review

Not very often does it happen that a book set in a completely different cultural milieu manages to feel so close to one’s heart. This is the story of a bored upper-middle class socialite: in some ways it’s a ‘coming-of-age’ story, except that the usual elements that define a classic coming-of-age setup are displaced in time: the elements start to come together during the globally accepted norm of adolescence, but find their culmination only in the protagonist’s 30s.

Growing up in a middling Istanbul family in the 80s and 90s turns out to be not too different from an equivalent Indian experience. At the centre is Peri, a girl who is sensitive ‘to the point of self-effacement’, growing up in a household where battle lines are drawn between father and mother,  between disparaging atheism and dauntless faith, between a longing for a better future and a hankering for the past. She develops her own credo, but is torn apart internally by her efforts to maintain external peace.

 A life-defining move to a university another country exposes her to a different kind of life. Yet, the battlelines are absurdly similar. The liberals, she discovers, are as prone to stereotyping and intolerance as are the conservatives.  The debates here are couched in sophisticated language, but the simmering tensions are the same.

 Of the eponymous ‘three daughters’ , she is the ‘Confused’, playing the thankless role of peacemaker between the ‘Believer’ and the ‘Sinner’. There is a mentor who could have helped her recognise her unique ability of being able to empathise with both sides. However, things take an unexpected turn, and it is only years later, in a day in bustling Istanbul involving a party for the elites, a mugging, a photograph from the past and armed robbery, that she experiences catharsis.

The story seems to end too soon, and I expected a stronger finish; but I’m not complaining. The book more than made up for it by its richness in its descriptions, in capturing the sights, sounds and flavours of Istanbul and Oxford, and in its ability to turn old arguments over into an entirely new light.

In an age when ‘taking offence’ has turned rampant, and when debates only cause positions to turn more intractable than ever, we need more of the wisdom that Shafak showcases in this book.

As the Professor puts it in the book, “… participating in an open debate is a bit like falling in love. You are a different person by the time it comes to an end.” Did the three daughters of Eve find this out for themselves in an experiment designed by their professor? I leave it to you to find out. 

Love in the time of sanitizers

 

It was a bright and warm day in April and the clocks were striking twenty-one. Days of lockdown that is. Who has the ability to keep time by the hour when the seconds and minutes have congealed into a gloopy mess of hours, she mused.

It was a momentous day, and she got up with not a little trepidation. The previous

day, worn down by her incessant proselytizing, the home sanitization protocol was adopted in the household, with unanimous approval. The usually unwilling member immediately accepted his duties (which not too long ago had been relegated to the one-person clean-freak of the abode).
This, then, was the first day of the new protocol and she was anxious to see what the day would bring.

Wake up and smell the roses, the poets used to sing in another era. But here she was waking up to the most reassuring smell in the world: heady fragrance of protection-granting, life-affirming sanitizer. With which the aforementioned member had swabbed the surfaces of the house, in accordance with his allocated duties. She felt woozy in delight, or it may just have been the effect of all the alcohol (strictly not less than 60%) in the air.

Even as she was revelling in the headiness of it all, she overhears snatches of father-toddler conversation from the other room.  “Clol Ekideen” she thinks she hears the toddler lisp.“  The beaming spouse looks up as she walks in, and says brightly, waving the spray bottle of sanitizer. “I just taught her the word of the day. It’s Chlorhexidine.”

And just like that, she fell in love all over again.

Nothing is the real Every Thing

My mind has been bursting
At its seams.
Filled with Everything
Filled with Nothing.

The act of living, it’s packed
With the Everything
That fills the hours
But hollows the soul.
And leaves a Nothing-sized hole
In the recesses of myself.

So I decided one day to put
The Everything on hold.
And have my fill of
The Nothing.

So I watched the sun rise
Listened to the birds chirp
Inhaled the aroma of my coffee
Soaked in the sights and sounds of rain
Flipped through photo albums
Called up an old friend
Savoured the taste of water
Pace mellowed, senses nimble.

I turned light with the weight of
All the Nothing that had filled my day.

And I feel that Nothing-sized hole

Fill up, well up with a light joy.

Sometimes Nothing is the real
Every Thing.

The blaze after the storm

Sunset after Cyclone Nisarga

Storm whorls whirl away
The sun sets the sky ablaze
Water turns to fire