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The White Tiger: A Review

Posted on March 22, 2009
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I just finished reading Aravind Adiga’s White Tiger. Two days, about 275 pages. It is an exciting read. The protagonist is a self-titled entrepreneur in Bangalore except that he’s not what most people imagine when they hear the word entrepreneur. He is a driver (chaffeur seems to grand a word for what we have them do in India) who goes on to own and run a fleet of taxi services for call centers in Bangalore, financing his startup by murdering his ex-employer and stealing his money (I’m not spoiling anybody’s read as this tidbit is revealed by the end of the first chapter). Along the way in this rags-to-riches story, he narrates the wretched life of the poor in India’s gleaming economy, starting from his birth in a little village in Northern India to his venture into a provincial town and eventually to Delhi and Bangalore. Landlords, caste system, joint families, the corruption, voting scandals, Ukranian prostitutes, the treatment of the poor by the rich and the treatment of the rich by the poor are all covered territories in the relatively short span of 275 pages. The short span also means that characters remain caricatures in some cases. But it is a mark of the driving narrative that despite revealing the ending right at the start, I was completely engrossed, cared about what happened to the protagonist (though I can’t say that I liked him) and kept turning the pages. I probably read the whole book in about four or so odd hours across two nights.

The book which won last year’s prestigious Man Booker Prize is free of literary gimmicks and style that I find so off-putting. Those would also be out of place, given that the story is narrated in first person by the protagonist, Balaram Halwai. The writing takes backseat to the narrative and never rings false, words that might seem strange when mouthed by a half-literate (half-baked as he calls himself) but street smart man. Three years ago, the award was won by another Indian, Kiran Desai for her book “The Inheritance of Loss”. The writing was quite beautiful, but the narration and the characters left me so cold, I didn’t care what happened to them by the end of the first chapter. Earlier this year, I tried reading Salman Rushdie’s “Midnight’s Children”, another Booker Prize winner and the winner of “Booker of Bookers” (the best novel of the past 25 years). I was so put off by his writing style that I again gave up in about fifty pages or so. His writing style frequently comes in the way of his narration, a style that seems more a style than of any substantive value. Arundhati Roy’s “God of Small Things”, another Booker Prize winner suffered from the same disease.

The book is not without metaphors and styles. The whole novel is in the form of letters to the Chinese Premier, who’s imminent visit to India, triggers the protagonist to write the letter, to reveal the true nature of entrepreneurs and India, a story that he says the Premier will not by told by any of his Indian hosts. The battle between India and China for West’s admiration (and money) is well known. Indians constantly talk about China and compare themselves against it. Adiga names the area from where the protagonist hails, Darkness, which is really what the villages of Northern India are. A key politician is called “The Great Socialist”. Many characters are only known by their animal names, names such as Mongoose, Buffalo and Stork. To the rather long list of stories that are used to describe Indians, he adds his own, the Rooster Coop.

The narrative itself does not reveal anything new, at least to Indians or those who know India beyond the headlines and glamour. When I narrated the story to Shanthala, she remarked that reality is far more multi-faceted than these single-faceted narratives. I found Rohinton Mistry’s “A Fine Balance” a far superior work that traverses a similar landscape as The White Tiger, but is set during the time of Emergency, that single blotch on India’s democratic period. I cried several times as I read that book. In comparison, the saddest scene in the book left me only feeling sorry for the state of affairs of the poor. Maybe that is only rightful since the narrator does not want your kerchief (he’s busy trying to take the shirt off your back). The narrator says that post-Independence, the only law that ruled the land was that of the jungle, eat or be eaten. If this book is about a prey turned predator, Mistry’s book was those who could not (or did not) turn predators. I found Mistry’s work a finer etching than this one is (it is also a much fatter etching, clocking nearly double the number of pages).

I found the coincidence of this book winning the Booker Prize and “Slumdog Millionaire” shining at the Oscars interesting (apparently, I’m not the only one). Both reveal the dark underbelly of India. I read a description of India that said “India is like a snake, it’s head is in the 21st century and it’s tail in the 19th”. Both works are about the tail end of life of India. Many in India dismissed Slumdog as “poverty porn”. Shanthala and I went with a friend to watch the movie, on a whim, not knowing what it was about. Our friend walked out a third of the way through the movie. “Bullshit”, he said, “This is what they choose to show about India. All this stuff doesn’t happen anymore”. I found the scenes and what befalls many of the children in the movie so harrowing, I sat down and cried (sissy!).

Recently, NYT published a story about how, even today, the malnutrition of children in India is worse than sub-Saharan Africa. For example, compared to China’s 7% (there is that comparison with China again), 42.5% of children under 5 years are underweight in India. Childhood anemia in India is three times higher than in China. Other far poorer nations have progressed much farther in reaching UN’s Millenium Development Goals. I can understand their anger, though I don’t agree. I find in their anger the anger of an insecure individual, trying to show that he’s made it too, that any pointing out of his flaws by the other success stories is only an attempt by them to downplay his success and a sign of their insecurity.

A part of their anger probably comes from feeling that the West has shown this side of the country for so long, that it’s stale. “Don’t you have anything new to say ?”, they say, “Move on. There are other stories to tell in this country now, stories that should make you feel less condescending”.

How strange! The West constructs an idea called “nation state” and we, those who singe at the slightest criticism from the West, swear allegiance to it and feel that our self-worth is tied up with it. “Power”, Dorothy Rowe wrote in Beyond Fear, “is always about who does the defining and who accepts the definitions”. We have accepted a particular definition of success and choose to measure ourselves against it instead of accepting definitions that seem far more life-giving or more aligned with the goals that many of the same people profess.

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A Bookstore That Was

Posted on February 17, 2009
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Change is a fact, progress a judgement.

We returned from Bangalore a few days back, having celebrated Maya’s first birthday with our parents, friends and relatives. The trip was unlike any other to Bangalore. In the past, we spent time finding good places to eat and eating at our already favorite haunts – such as MTR, Red Mount, Queens, Mainland China, Brindavan, Taj Residency and Taj West End, poring over music collections in Planet M and Music World, walking up and down M.G. Road and Brigade Road, catching a Hindi movie and spending countless hours in bookstores such as Blossom, Strand, Gangarams and Premier. This time, I squeezed in a hurried dinner at Brindavan mixed with quick stops at Strand, Blossom and Planet M. Tired after an all day meeting at work, I didn’t want to travel the congested roads again on another day and I couldn’t even muster the energy to walk upto Premier.

The next day over dinner at a friend’s place, his wife laid the local daily, Deccan Herald, in front of me, the paper opened at the sad news that Premier bookshop was to shutter its doors, in 10 days. Shocked and saddened, I resolved to make another trip just to visit Premier and bid adieu to it’s owner, Mr. Shanbhag.

When I visited Bangalore as a child, M.G. Road and Brigade Road were magical places, next only to my grandparents’ place in Rajajinagar. Dinners at restaurants like Rice Bowl, Topkapi, Princess and Peacock, breakfasts of succulent idlys submerged in sambar and crisp masala dosas at Koshy’s (the one on Brigade which closed a long time ago), James Bond movies at Lido, other English movies such as Jaws, Italian Job (the old one starring Michael Caine) at cinema halls such as Blumoon, Bludiamond, Galaxy and Rex were major highlights of the trip, moments savored for the rest of the year, till we came again. When I was younger, Sapphire, a toy store at the corner of Brigade Road and Church Street was the place to load up on toys. As I grew older and reading became my passion, bookstores became my mecca.

Bangalore must be unique among all the Indian cities when it comes to bookstores. The best ones crowd around M.G. Road and Brigade, but are not uncommon in other parts of the city. For example, I remember a small newspaper stand along Sampige Road in Malleswaram where I’d attempt to retrieve the latest Phantom comic (a futile search most often as they’d be sold out). Many articles have been written about Bangalore’s love affair with books.

In my early years, my father took me to only Higginbothams. A stranger to used books (anything used for that matter) and side roads, he stuck to big names and main promenades (still does). So Higginbothams was all I knew of a bookstore in Bangalore for a while. Unfortunately, the store would usually be closed when we got there. It would shut early (around 6 or so, if my memory serves me right) in those days and would also be shut during the afternoons and Sundays. And so trying to go there after my father finished his meeting or on a Sunday would only render me speechless and in tears. Since my reading became all-consuming when we lived in Kerala, I took to loading up on my books in Cochin, at a bookstore along the main highway to Bangalore.

Soon after, Gangarams opened and with it a whole new world. I had started reading the Hardy Boys and Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators (I still remember Jupiter Jones, Peter Crenshaw and Bob Andrews). My father befriended one of proprietors of the store and I’d call from Kerala, before we left, to ask him to reserve some of these books. Once, I think because a trip to Bangalore got canceled, my father even had them ship the reserved titles to our home in Kollam (called Quilon in those days by non-locals).

As I grew into college and my reading grew into Gary Zukav and Fritjof Capra and my own footsteps led me away from the main roads, I discovered Premier bookstore. Just off M.G. Road, it quickly became a hallowed place. Premier had two aisles running through the store, with books piled way high on either side of the aisles. There was a method to the madness, but I found it to be more fun to browse as if the books were stacked at random. Browsing books became my own little treasure hunt, for who knows what I might discover (I discovered Noam Chomsky on one such browsing expedition in a London bookstore). In Premier’s aisles, Sartre and Ayn Rand elbowed J. Krishnamurti and Robert Pirsig, Desmond Bagley vied for attention with Robert Ludlum while Rudy Rucker and Paul Davies challenged Gary Zukav and Fritjof Capra. Book after book, title after title, description after description, my eyes scanned. My heart felt like it’d burst sometimes. How would I ever manage to read them all ? My father would give me a fixed sum of money (generous, but still limited compared to so many that I wanted to buy) with which I had to buy books and my other love, music cassettes.

At Premier, under the piles and piles, I unearthed Mark Tully, Ramachandra Guha and Pawan K Varma, obscure titles such as Environmentalism of the Poor and bestsellers such as Fooled by Randomness. What made visiting Premier even more lucrative was that Mr. Shanbhag offered upto 20% off the list price. Always amicable, he knew whether a book was in store or not and knew exactly buried under which pile a book was. Many times, I went in looking for a specific title and came out with something else in hand; the new find seemed more intriguing.

Visiting Premier took me back to my dead grandfather’s library, a fact I did not realize until much later. Similarly piled, rows of what seemed obscure titles, books on science mixed with books on Indian spirituality, similarly crowded in a small room, with a bed in one end of the room, on which he lay, holding forth about any book I chanced upon. There seemed no order to his collection either. I dearly loved my mother’s father, loved his love of books, bathed in his affection and pride in my reading. His first grandchild, my mom (and grandmother) says I was his favorite grandson, even though he always professed his egalitarian love for all his grandchildren. A part of my childhood died when he died. My mind is still scarred from my last image of him, lying shriveled with disease in a general ward in a hospital on the outskirts of Bangalore. I drove to see him with my cousin one night, still immature about things like death, still wallowing in my youthful pride. I almost ran away when I saw him. I scarcely recognized him. In his last days, his eyes almost gone due to cataract, he had been unable to read even with a strong magnifying glass. He’d sit on the porch of the house, trying desperately to read the daily newspaper. I’d be too impatient to read for him for long. I wanted to browse the books when my cousin was at school and play with my cousin when he returned. I had too little time to spend reading some boring paper. I remember him trying to stop passersby, imploring them to read him a section of the paper.

Premier bookshop has not only merited articles in mature dailies like The Hindu, but also a short documentary film, sponsored by San Francisco Film Society. A teaser of the documentary is available online.

On the day I went to Premier to say my last goodbye, I found Mr. Shanbhag beseiged by two women pleading with him to not close, that they’d help him relocate. Deccan Herald had quoted him as saying that he needed to undergo an eye surgery and he then wanted to go spend time with his daughter in Australia. The phone rang and Mr. Shanbhag answered. “No, the book is not in stock right now”, he said, “But, if you come in a week’s time, I can order it for you”. He was shutting the shop in 10 days and still ordering books for delivery in a week’s time! “You just can’t say no”, said one of the women, who appeared to be a journalist (she made notes of the comments his customers said as they departed). Many expressed their sadness at the closing of the store. I shuffled around the bookstore, looking for something to buy, something I might enjoy reading, something obscure and interesting at the same time, a final purchase that represented all that the bookstore stood for. I finally spotted “Writing A Nation: An Anthology of Indian Journalism”, edited by a Nirmala Lakshman. Just the book I wanted.

As I paid, I offered my hand to Mr. Shanbhag. “Thank you for the pleasure all these years”, I said, “I’ll miss you. Bangalore will miss you”. He took my hand and smiling his usual happy, twinkling-eyes smile, said “Thank you. I haven’t seen you in a long time. Oh, wait! You live in the US now”. I was touched that he remembered me, after all these years.

And I left. Another part of my life vanished with the closure of Premier. A part seemingly protected from the vagaries of time and age. My grandfather’s house is gone, a place I can no longer visit to relive my childhood. My grandparents themselves are gone. Little by little, my reliving of my past is going, fading with age, with change. But we’re creating a new past, a past for our child, Maya.

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How Doctors Think: A Review

Posted on October 30, 2008
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The sister of a friend of mine in India suffered from Crohn’s disease, a disease of the digestive system that is rare amongst Asians. Her condition was misdiagnosed for several years, causing her an immense amount of suffering. I have another friend who’s wife is suffering from something that has not been identified yet. Every doctor seems to think something else is wrong and she’s subject to a different treatment each time. Even temporary relief is rare.

Studies based on autopsies indicate that 10-15% of diagnosis are wrong. What are the causes of these failures of diagnosis ? Is it that the condition is really rare such as in the case of Crohn’s disease that it is difficult for the doctors to know or is it something else ? Come to think of it, how do doctors think their way to a diagnosis ? And why is it that many times, two different doctors disagree on the diagnosis ? What if I were a drunk or if I was obese ? Does my doctor emotionally react to my state (in disgust, for example) or don’t they ? If they do, how does that color their care ? What if they were positively affected by my condition, seeing me fit, in good condition, articulate and well mannered ? Does their positive thinking about me negatively affect my care ?

How Doctors Think by Dr. Jerome Kroopman is a book that addresses these questions. Dr. Kroopman, himself a physician and a professor at Harvard Medical School, has written a brilliant, lucid and engrossing book that addresses the very nature of how doctors think. That our thinking is fraught with myriad cognitive biases is well accepted now. This book illustrates how those errors are at the heart of incorrect diagnosis and the conditions that cause them.

Dr. Kroopman says that experts studying misdiagnosis that caused serious harm to patients attribute most errors to errors in thinking, not to lack of medical knowledge. He quotes one study that attributed 80% of misdiagnosis to cognitive errors, and another study that parceled inadequate medical knowledge to only 4% of the cases. About 15% of all diagnosis were incorrect says a 1995 report in which doctors provided a diagnosis based on written descriptions of the patient’s symptoms and examined actors simulating patients with various diseases. The average diagnostic error in interpreting medical images (such as XRays, CAT scans and MRI) is about 20-30%, an alarmingly large number. In a study assessing 100 radiologists on chest x-rays, they disagreed amongst themselves 20% of the time, when asked the same question a few days later after studying the same x-ray again, they disagreed with themselves 5-10% of the time. 60% of them failed to identify a missing clavicle. But cuing them saying that these x-rays were part of identifying cancer, 83% of them identified the missing clavicle, when told that it was part of an annual physical, 58% missed the finding.

Over the course of 320 pages and 10 chapters, Dr. Kroopman looks at different kinds of doctors from ER physicians to family practitioners to pediatricians to radiologists to specialists and brings a keen eye to the nuances of each profession, their difficulties and their practices and how cognitive errors enter the diagnostic process. In an era where doctors find themselves squeezed by money on either end, by big money pharma on one end and by the insurance industry at the other end, the book also addresses the kinds of cognitive errors that result, in part, by the the role of these two major ecosystem players.

The Cognitive Errors

Dr. Kroopman runs through the gamut of cognitive biases as he follows the minds of doctors during the course of their making a diagnosis. Many of these cognitive biases amplify each other resulting in a decision that seems rock solid to the physician but is not.

When a doctor sends a request to a radiologist asking for a check of the lungs for checking lung cancer, that question makes the radiologist think in a particular way, about lung cancer as opposed to say pneumonia. Or at other times, a doctor may send a patient to a specialist with a statement such as “I’m sending you a case of renal failure and diabetes”. Forcing doctors to think about particular outcomes makes them not think about certain others. This creates the framing error. A simple joke illustrates the framing error. Two friends go to a church for praying and one of them gets an urge to smoke. He decides to check with the priest before smoking. He asks the padre, “Father, is it OK to smoke while I pray” to which the father responds with utter horror and chastises him. When he reports the result to his friend, his friend says that he asked the wrong question and proceeds to ask, “Father, is it OK to pray while I smoke” to which the padre gushes, “My son, it is always OK to pray when you’re doing anything”. The first question activated the “smoking” frame and the second, the “praying” frame. The annual physical versus the cancer example quoted at the start of this article is a more pertinent and troubling example of the framing error.

A pediatrician seeing a stream of cranky children with fever who have the flu can easily overlook the one exception with meningitis. A doctor in India seeing a patient with diarrhea, vomiting and abdominal pain is more likely to consider irritable bowel syndrome rather than Crohn’s disease because that is the common case and Crohn’s is hardly seen. In other words, the brain arrives at a specific conclusion (or set of conclusions) based on the information that is easily available and we implicitly assume that “if we can think of it, it must be important”. This is called availability error. If I asked you if there are more number of words that start with the letter t compared to words which have t as the third letter, you’re more likely to think that it’s the former because of the ease with which you can come up with words that start with the letter t.

Once we’ve arrived at a conclusion, we tend to selectively look for data that confirm our conclusion and ignore or reinterpret the rest. This is called confirmation bias. Ego is a big factor here since we like to think of ourselves as more competent than we really are. Various studies show that the more incompetent we are, the more certain we tend to act (Sarah Palin effect ?). One example that Dr. Kroopman points to is a study comparing 100 radiologists in which the bottom twenty were more confident than the top twenty.

In another anecdote, a doctor looking for the cause of a persistent ache in the hand concludes that the cause are cysts in the hand when the problem was something else altogether. Search satisficing is caused by our stopping to look for causes once we’ve settled on one. For example, if you’re rushing to the airport and realize you’re missing your wallet, you start searching for it desperately; once you find it, elated, you rush out of the house, only to realize much later that you’ve forgotten the plane ticket inside. Having seen the cysts, the doctor stopped looking for other causes. Dr. Kroopman quotes a physician, “”Finding something maybe satisfactory, but not finding everything is suboptimal”.

Anchoring is another reason for search satisficing. In an experiment, participants were asked about the percentage of African nations that were members of the UN. They asked one group whether the percentage was more or less than 45% and they asked the other group if the percentage was more or less than 65%. Each group tended to anchor their answer around the number quoted to them, 45% or 65%. The doctor who arrived at the cysts as the answer, weighted his diagnosis by anchoring his decision on the importance of cysts.

Many of these errors are also caused by attribution error, especially if the patient is associated with negative stereotypes. Dr. Kroopman provides the anecodote of a patient who comes to a doctor after a decade of illness with labels of “anorexic” and “psychiatric” and how those labels helped many doctors give the patient a short shrift, arriving at a diagnosis rather quickly. Similarly, a doctor seeing a very personable, older patient may demur from subjecting him to a more invasive test that would really clear that little lingering uncertainty about the diagnosis.

Commission bias is caused because of the very nature of the medical profession (nay, the Western culture). It is the desire to act instead of observe. “Don’t just stand there, do something” is the Western mantra. Dr. Kroopman points to surgeons as examples of people with this bias.

The Conditions

All these cognitive biases are heuristics that we resort to when we’re in a hurry. Most of these biases can be overcome by pondering. But in an age where pediatricians and general practitioners attempt to remedy their lowering reimbursements from HMOs by seeing more patients, ponder is something they cannot do. And in places like ER, the very nature of what they do forces the physicians to work quickly. One ER physician is quoted as saying that he feels like a circus juggler, spinning plates on a stick; slowing down will cause everything to crash. Similarly, a primary care physician is quoted as saying that looking for the out of the ordinary gets very hard because she feels like someone looking for a face in a passing train; if the train goes faster and faster or if you get distracted, you can easily miss that face. Dr. Kroopman states that on the average, a radiologist views 150 CAT scans over a weekend and a CAT scan has dozens of images; new technologies such as MRI produce hundreds of images. Scanning them visually looking for errors takes time and time is always pressing (on the other hand, a radiologist who looks at an image for more than 38 seconds, risks seeing things that aren’t there).

Physicians also have to walk a balancing act between raising unnecessary fears and ignoring real problems. Learning how to communicate becomes a key factor. Dr. Kroopman says that there is a myth that a brilliant doctor is a poor communicator and a good communicator is a poor doctor. Both are essential, he says. A good doctor is one who communicates well, listens and speaks. The kinds of questions (s)he asks can result in a diagnosis arrived at through a stream of cognitive errors. Most of us are afraid and anxious when we visit a doctor, we also don’t want to appear stupid, as somebody wasting the doctor’s time. If we perceive the doctor is rushed or don’t get asked the right set of questions, we may not provide the information necessary to arrive at the right diagnosis. A study found that on average, a doctor interrupts a patient 18 seconds after the patient first starts telling their story.

Dr. Kroopman also says that much of what doctors practice is a result of where and under whom they studied. Shanthala tells me of procedures that were insisted on in her MD program that the hospital where she works don’t insist and instead do it slightly differently. “Playing God” is a familiar term used to describe doctors. Part of that allure is the mask of certainty that most doctors exude. Dr. Kroopman says that the orthodox and conservative medical establishment fosters such attitudes.

What Can We Do

Reading books like this can leave us wondering if there’s anything we can do. Fortunately, Dr. Kroopman offers lots of suggestions, questions that we can ask to jar the doctor out of their heuristics. For example, we can ask what organs are around where we’re having the problem forcing the doctor to consider other possibilities than gall stones. Or we could ask the doctor to compare the lingering pain post-surgery to having a tooth pulled to get more specific answers. He even helpfully summarizes all these questions in a single epilogue.

Dr. Kroopman addresses these and much more in a book filled with real life anecdotes, many from his own life, both as a doctor and as patient; most of the cases are real cliff hangers. He rarely casts a jaundiced eye on either the doctor, the system or the patient, though he does sound skeptical about the current health care system with insurance companies and big pharma calling the shots. Overall, a very knowledgable and pleasurable read. Highly recommended.
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Return To Fiction

Posted on August 10, 2008
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“To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you, and hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations – such is a pleasure beyond compare.” – Yeshido Kenko, Japanese monk.

Fiction is back with a bang. For years, I’ve not read much fiction at all, focusing all my reading energy on non-fiction, on subjects ranging from neuroscience and human behavior to history, politics, anthropology and just a little smidgin of philosophy. Once in a while, I paid my dues to the fiction world by reading a short story collection such as Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies, Collected Works of Andre Dubus and The Complete Short Stories of Ruskin Bond. Whenever I tried reading a novel, my eyes would grow weary, my mind would drift, and I’d discontinue pretty quickly.

A few years back, I was talking to a close friend of mine who had just become a father. What have you read lately, I asked. Winnie the Pooh, cover to cover, several times, he replied. When Maya arrived, I found myself exhausted and unable to concentrate on the books by my bedside. I’d pick up Orientalism by Edward Said or Darwin’s Dangerous Idea by Daniel Dennett and find myself at the same page, day after day. But I wasn’t ready to read Winnie the Pooh yet. A friend had just finished reading a science fiction novel called Parable of the Talents by Octavia Butler and thought that I might like it. Surprisingly enough, I did. I hadn’t read science fiction since I left India, back in October of 2005.

While the book was too violent and graphic for my taste, it was gripping. It told the story of a woman who tries to establish a new religion in the aftermath of a world torn apart by global warming. She makes Change her god, chaos theory and quantum mechanics her metaphysics and with some smattering of rituals and lucid rhymes managed to build a following. How they are discriminated by a country caught in fear over the calamities was harrowingly depicted. For the first time, I could see myself as the object of discrimination and hate as a minority, as the Other. In the aftermath of 9/11, it is not hard for me to see that this country can go back to its Christian roots to discriminate and destroy anything that doesn’t resemble a White, Christian majority. Despite much talk to contrary, this country is very puritanical and conservative. Consider the ease with which Bush wakes despite many credible reports of misleading a country deliberately and destroying at least a hundred thousand lives and miring the economy of this country (Ron Susskind’s book is the latest in many such reports). Clinton was nearly impeached for having an affair with an intern and lying about it. But Bush walks about cockily, spouting his disdain for reality.

What that book did more than anything else was to reopen the world of fiction for me. I discovered Robert Sawyer whose novels are my idea of a perfect science fiction. Instead of epic space operas with the same earthly wars and dysfunctional behavior spread across star systems instead of being limited to Earth, Sawyer’s novels were intelligent, almost completely violence free stories that blended anthropology, fringes of quantum mechanics, neuroscience and social sciences in an intelligent, very believable package. The first of his books that I read was Calculating God, a story about two alien species landing on earth, demanding to meet an anthropologist and asking him for the fossil record of Earth. The aliens find that the great catastrophic wipeouts of species that happened on Earth had happened at the same time in two other places in the Universe, both of which were inhabited. The aliens had concluded that this was a sign of intelligent design, of a maker. The novel presented some of the most readable arguments for and against the existence of god, about how humans construct moral dilemmas that are meaningless to an alien, how our thinking and logic are born out of our physiology, that our mind is embodied. For example, one of the alien species has a prime number of appendages, 53. The main protagonist, another alien, expounds to the earth bound hero how in a society where you have a prime number of appendages, it is not adaptive to come up with an accurate number system.

I followed that up with Sawyer’s Nebula and Hugo award winning Hominid trilogy, about a parallel Earth with neanderthals instead of human beings. In the process of factoring a really large prime number on a quantum computer, an accident drops a neanderthal amongst humans, in this world. It is based on the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics that posits that there are many parallel universes. The accident connects two parallel universes, one in which neanderthals wiped out humans and the other is this one, where we wiped out the neanderthals. This leads to a brilliant exposition on how human societies are an artifact of our physiology, of how alternate societies that have a different physiology may be constructed, of hunter gatherer societies versus agrarian societies, of the evolution of consciousness and quantum computing. Aspects of Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel come to life in this book in a way that made me appreciate and understand the ideas even more. Shanthala who never really cared for science fiction, gobbled up his books as quickly as I could get them. One of the chapters from the second book in the trilogy has a much talked about chapter on the Vietnam memorial. Ponter, the Neanderthal is wondering the point of the memorial. His human protagonist (and lover), Mary tells him that it is to honor the dead. Ponter asks if the point was to honor the dead, to remember so that we don’t repeat past mistakes, if wars are still fought. When Mary says yes, Ponter responds with: “They should do it right here,” said Ponter, flatly. “Their leader — the president, no? — he should declare war right here, standing in front of these fifty-eight thousand, two hundred and nine names. Surely that should be the purpose of such a memorial: if a leader can stand and look at the names of all those who died a previous time a president declared war and still call for young people to go off and be killed in another war, then perhaps the war is worth fighting.”

My friend, the one who got me started on fiction, then lent me Yann Martel’s Life of Pi. Its hard to describe a book that has its heart the story of a boy and a Royal Bengal Tiger adrift in a small boat after the ship carrying them sinks in an accident. But it is so brilliantly imagined, so well written and such an amazing amalgam of adventure, philosophy, India and a tale of survival, that it was hard to put down. Though it is written by a Spanish author, I think it’d be easy to mistake it as coming from the pen of an Indian writer. Some of the book’s reflections were quite profound. For example, there was a piece in the book that captured one of the main reasons I grappled with Kitty’s death by writing so much: “The matter is difficult to put into words. For fear, real fear, such as shakes you to your foundation, such as you feel when you are brought face to face with your mortal end, nestles in your memory like a gangrene: it seeks to rot everything, even the words with which to speak of it. So you must fight hard to express it. You must fight hard to shine the light of words upon it. Because if you don’t, if your fear becomes a wordless darkness that you avoid, perhaps even manage to forget, you open yourself to further attacks of fear because you never truly fought the opponent who defeated you.”

I then attacked an 800 page tome, Rohinton Mistry’s “A Fine Balance”. I was completely unaware of the effect of the emergency declared by Indira Gandhi on the lives of the poor and downtrodden. The book is written with such empathy and feeling for the characters, without ever becoming maudlin, it was hard to put down and harder to be not affected. How simple vagaries of life such as missing a train can wreak such havoc on the less fortunate !

Now, I was on a roll. My next book was Allegra Goodman’s Intuition, the story of modern science, of the drudgery of delivering empirical results, of the dangers and lure of big money that go with the possibility of big medical cures, of human foibles and hope. It is again so well written, it was as suspenseful as a thriller. Who says that philosophical meditations on the nature of science cannot be tautly presented and written ? This is a book that should plant the joy of fiction in just about anyone, so richly imagined and well written is it. The quote “Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures” holds well for this book.

I reread Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies and read her Namesake for the first time. Her writing is luminous, limpid as an alpine lake, propelling the reader forward by the sheer strength of the story. The first story in Interpreter of Maladies is devastating. I’ve reread it so many times, gasping each time as the denouement is reached. Her metaphors don’t strain, are used sparingly and aptly and blend in so well with the story, it is a thing of joy. For example, in The Namesake, the mother of the hero, Ashima (which means without borders in Bengali) is pregnant and alone in a strange land, having come to the US immediately after her arranged marriage to an academic struggling in Boston, a city as far away as can be imagined from her home, Calcutta. Lahiri writes: “For being a foreigner, Ashima is beginning to realize, is a sort of lifelong pregnancy – a perpetual wait, a constant burden, a continuous feeling out of sorts. It is an ongoing responsibility, a parenthesis in what had once been an ordinary life, only to discover that that previous life has vanished, replaced by something more complicated and demanding. Like pregnancy, being a foreigner, Ashima believes, is something that elicits the same curiosity from strangers, the same combination of pity and respect”.

In the Interpreter of Maladies, there is a story where the cultural difference between India and the US is brought out sharply but humourously when a little girl thanks an elderly Indian guest for his present of candy. “What is this thank you ?”, responds the gentleman. “The lady at the bank thanks me, the cashier at the shop thanks me, the librarian thanks me when I return an overdue book, the overseas operator thanks me as she tries to connect me to Dacca and fails. If I am buried in this country I will be thanked, no doubt, at my funeral.” I had a similar experience with friends and family back in India when I thanked them. In a culture bound by tradition and duty, there is nothing to thank, it’s your duty.

Next in line was another intelligent, well written book called “The Curious Incident of the Dog In the Night Time” by Mark Haddon, a story told through the eyes of a thirteen year old autistic kid. It was a revealing glimpse of how an autistic mind works. The book is filled with interesting soliloquies on various issues and trifles such as the Monty Hall problem, all from an autistic perspective. I then read Frank McCourt’s classic memoir, “Angela’s Ashes”. At first, I found the writing interesting, but didn’t understand what the hoopla was all about. When the book came out, it was on everybody’s lips and even was made into a movie (a bad one according to the critics). Shanthala had read it and enjoyed it. I was ready to give up after fifty pages, but something made me continue. I then realized how funny the memoir was about a life as wretched as they come. My sister tells me that my writing is mostly heavy and sombre. I realized how difficult it must be to write in such a humorous manner about something that was so devastating to live.

Not all books were completed. I couldn’t get past the first few pages of Arundhati Roy’s much acclaimed “The God of Small Things”. The writing called too much attention to itself and intruded too much into the story. The same thing happened to Tom Robbins’ Jitterbug Perfume. I also found Kiran Desai’s Booker Prize winning “The Inheritance of Loss” cold and uninteresting. Her writing was excellent in places, but the story neither grabbed me nor could the writing sustain my interest for more than a few pages.

Lying on my bookshelf, still waiting to be read are Ethan Canin’s short story collection “The Emperor of Air” and Jhumpa Lahiri’s latest collection of short stories, “Unaccustomed Earth”.

Reflecting on fiction a while back, I thought that it was a great way to put myself in the shoes of others, empathize with characters and situations that life may not have afforded me yet and in the process, consider ways of being and thinking that maybe vastly different from mine. As Charles Lamb said, “I love to lose myself in other men’s minds…. Books think for me.” Well imagined writing such as Life of Pi are a sheer delight to read, reading for pleasure, for the sheer exhilaration of watching people string words together that is pure ecstasy.

“A good book should leave you… slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it” – William Styron, American novelist

References:
1. http://www.sfwriter.com/: Link to Robert Sawyer’s webpage with excerpts from all his books
2. http://wrongquestions.blogspot.com/2007/11/intuition-by-allegra-goodman.html: Review of Allegra Goodman’s Intuition

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