Book Review: In Spite of the Gods by Edward Luce

Read this book titled "In Spite of the Gods: The Rise of Modern India" by Edward Luce and enjoyed it thoroughly. He is a British journalist, who has served as the New Delhi bureau chief of Financial Times from 2001 to 2006. He is living in Washington D.C. now. His years in India, his position combined with his background (he is married to an Indian who is a World Bank economist) seems to have given him a good grip on a wide range of topics discussed in the book. Though I am not following Indian politics/headlines/hot topics closely on a daily basis, I found his assertions and assessments quite in line with my image of what is India today. In some parts of the world the subtitle seems to be modified slightly as "The Strange Rise of Modern India"..!

He starts off with a visit to Auroville, a spiritual town full of Westerners seeking India's spiritual elixir, which is home to the Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry. Starting from there he tours around various parts of India to get a good view of India's schizophrenic mix of ultra modern and medieval economies lingering side by side. Second chapter discusses the extent to which the state permeates people's daily lives, how well entrenched the civilian cadre of officers are, and despite knowing well how corrupt government officials are, and poor villagers still seeing landing a government job (from which no one gets fired) as their path to economic salvation. Moving on, the next section discussing north and south India paints a clear picture of how different the quality of governance is. He provides pointers like the literacy rate in Tamilnadu (about 90%) Vs. Bihar (less than 50%), well paved roads and seemless WiFi service in Hyderabad full of MNC software giants Vs. Patna (capital of Bihar) where making a phone call from your room to the hotel front desk is tough and all the roads are broken, while (even economically poor rural) women in Tamilnadu's coastal region discuss and complain about how they have been paid only 90% of the tsunami relief monies, women in rural north Indian villages won't even come out of their huts to talk to a foreigner. He himself explicitly states that he is not trying to portray Tamilnadu as heaven but compared to several northern states, southern states have much better quality of governance, only 10 to 20% of funds being siphoned off compared to 70 to 80% in the north. 

Subsequent chapters talk in depth about castes, Nehru-Gandhi dynasty and the sycophants that surrounds the leaders, the Kashmir issue with Pakistan (he had interviewed General Musharraf), the triangular dance going on between India, China and US each with its own intentions and end goals, nuclear deterrent, Bollywood movies and so forth. Everywhere he manages to retain readers' attention. 

  

He visits Dar-ul-Uloom -the House of Knowledge- a large Islamic school in a town called Deoband. The Maulana (an honorific title given to the Muslim leader) asks him if he wants any refershment to which Luce responds with a request for a Nescafe coffee, which is probably the only kind of coffee you will get in those parts. The Maulana says that he had earlier issued a fatwa preventing all faithfuls from consuming any of the American or British products to protest against their attacks on the muslim brethren. Luce trying to argue that he is not a faithful (since he is not aMuslim) and Nestle is actually a company in Switzerland, etc. doesn't help. Still the Maulana after thinking through it a bit comes up with a solution saying the fatwa he issued applies only to products bought after 9/11 and so by locating an instant coffee sachet bought before 9/11, they manage to serve him a cup of coffee..! With such a convenient & thoughtful loophole found in the fatwa for his sake, Luce says it was one of the most satisfying cup of coffee he ever had. :-)

There are no charts or graphs in the book (though there are a bunch of photographs collected in few pages in the middle) and the tone is not too academic but still the work is serious enough to dive into serious topics earnestly. It is his perception of people, places, events, organizations he had come across in India, which is a functioning anarchy. The list of big names in India that he had interviewed sound quite impressive as it ranges from political leaders (Manmohan Singh, Sonia Gandhi, Vajpayee, Lalu Prasad Yadav), industrialists (Hinduja), tech titans (Nilekani, Premji) to Bollywood stars (Amitabh Bachchan), sport stars, IAS officers, spiritual leaders (Sri Sri Ravishankar) and so on. His wit is entertaining. Describing one of the modern gurus (Ravishankar) very popular in India, he says the guru is sitting in a large prayer hall with hundreds of devotees in front, with flowing long hair and beard, with a nice air conditioner on, looking like Jesus Christ is shooting a shampoo commercial. :-) There are mild jokes thrown in once in a while pointing out things like in India "You don't cast your vote but vote your caste", India never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity, etc. While he is on the whole respectful of people & culture, he relentlessly points out all the flaws in the system as in the cases of free or subsidized products and services provided by the government purportedly to help the poor ending up filling up the coffers of the rich and resulting in the exact opposite effect of depriving the poor even more. A good case in point is free electricity state governments provide to help the poor farmers. In reality only the well connected rich farmers who don't need the freebie enjoy the delivery, run the pump sets 24x7 to irrigate their large lands endlessly as there is no incentive to turn the pumps off that results in water table getting lower and lower preventing poor farmers who can't afford electric pumps from accessing any water through their manual means.

In the last section he lists the following four problems that require urgent attention, if India had to reach its envisioned super power status in the future. 

- The challenge of lifting 300 million people out of abject poverty

- Overcoming the dangers of rapid environmental degradation

- Heading off the specter of an HIV-AIDS epidemic

- Protecting and strengthening India's system of liberal democracy

His prescriptions are a bit vague and skimpy. I am also sure that we can add couple more bullets to the list or debate whether these four are the valid ones that should be on top. Similarly, Indian readers may not see a lot of new information in the book, while foreigners may not know the cast of characters well enough to enjoy the book as much as I did. But on the whole he does a nice job of presenting the background history and current status of this land of contrast well to conclude that India is not on autopilot to greatness but it would take an incompetent pilot to crash the plane.

Planning to read a similar work on China for which  China Goes Global:The Partial Power by David Shambaugh looked like a good candidate. Haven't bought it yet. Do you know of anything better?

-sundar.

Book Review(s)

I bought Viktor E. Frankl's "Man's Search for Meaning" about 3 years back and it was sitting on the shelf patiently ever since. It is a fairly small book of about 160 pages. Frankl was a psychiatrist in Austria, captured by the Nazis and placed in concentration camps for 5 years before he got out and eventually published several books including this one. First half of the book talks about life in the concentration camps during the second world war. While he describes the horrors of people being put to death, the showers, lack of any kind of nourishment, sleeping next to dead bodies and so forth, he is not trying to describe things just for shock value, limiting himself saying enough has been written now that describes these camps, and so there is no need. 

I remember reading a while back as to how our minds adapt themselves to any given situation filling themselves with the task of analyzing what is in front. Thus, a cut in our pinky may look much more important to us taking up our whole thought process though we might have read about/seen on TV an ongoing famine in another part of the world killing thousands of people. But if we are in the midst of a famine, a cut in a pinky won't even register. By the same token, even in as abject a situation as in a concentration camp where you see people dying and put to death daily, our elastic mind adjusts itself to focus on finding some sort of meaning to one's existence so that one can live on. As the author quotes Nietzsche, "He who has a Why to live for can bear almost any How." Getting some peas with the soup (instead of just broth water), cracking jokes about the SS guards, thinking about the nice life one is going to lead after getting out of the camp one day, making up stories about how one's friends & family must be getting along outside and one will meet them soon, etc. all provide causes/reasons for hope that makes one survive the camp day by day. Of course when this hope is lost, author says he saw human beings in the camp simply giving up, not getting up one day to go to mindless work one is forced to do, knowing fully well that not getting up will lead to one's death in the hands of the guards.  He argues that those prisoners who gave up on life were the first to die. The main cause for their death is the lack of a reason to live for rather than lack of food or medicine. These realizations/observations got him to develop his ideas for logotherapy, discussion of which forms the second half of the book.

Contrary to Freudian and other conventional psychiatry ideas that human mind is driven by its pursuit of happiness, Frankl's Logotherapy claims that human beings are driven by a search for a meaning in their lives. This seems to explain as to why even when your existence is reduced to such misery as in a concentration camp, people are able to live on and survive. Where pursuit of happiness doesn't stand a lot of chance to keep you going in such extreme situations, search for a meaning can. 

After he got out of the camps, he had setup a successful practice and had treated depression, loss of hope, bi-polar and other range of psychiatric disorders using this model. He describes his approach by discussing several case studies. For example, a mother who had a mentally disabled child that eventually dies and a remaining one that is crippled. While this situation will be extremely depressing to the mother pushing her towards suicide and pursuit of happiness beyond that point in her life will be very difficult, figuring out a meaning as to how/why it happened appears to work better. In this example, asking the mother, would she have not had the child at all rather than going through this pain always makes the mother realize that her love for the child trumps the pain and so as painful as it may be, she still treasures the experience.  The child that died early lived though short a life filled with her love rather than a long life that is bereft of love while the second one is surviving thanks to her. One can view these as nothing more than clever arguments or tricks. But viewing the same scenario from a totally different perspective does change one's view and if that makes you happy/satisfied giving you a reason to go on with life even under extenuating circumstances, then there is all the more reason to embrace such arguments. Reading such books/ideas periodically should help us realize how blessed we are in our lives and how silly the things we keep worrying/fighting about on a daily basis be it a silly ego tiff with our spouses or some work related issues not going right temporarily. Frankl's genuine tone of humility in his writing is humbling. 

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Also read a novel titled "The Sunshine when she is gone" by Thea Goodman. 

It is a story of a rich young couple living in NYC with a small baby. The city/career oriented life they lead, with a nanny to look after the baby, gets under their skin. So, one day the husband just takes the baby and gets on a plane going to Barbados for a weekend without telling his wife. Of course he flies back after two days and gets back with his wife. While the idea is interesting, execution is not that interesting. To balance out husband's this heinous "crime" violating the wife's confidence, wife cheats on the husband in a contrived scenario and so when they find out what the other did, they are even and they move on. I bought the book after hearing about it in the radio thinking Maya might enjoy the novel. She gave up halfway and I was the one who read the whole book. You can skip this one. :-)

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My son Arjun is on summer vacation. Just to keep him engaged, I get him books to read that should be just above his level. I have commented about Malcolm Gladwell's books before, saying he usually has a grain of a good idea worth writing a Newyorker article about but then adds a lot of fluff and builds a book around it. So, thought they should be good choices for a kid that had just finished elementary school. :-) So, got him The Tipping Point and Outliers from the public library. He loved them and finished reading them in one day each..! 

I had read Gladwell's "The Tipping Point" and "Blink" before and since then swore off Gladwell books. But, Arjun finishing these books one per day put me to shame as I usually take months to finish "Collapse" type books I pick up. I had to convince myself that it is indeed the dense content that slows me down. So, decided to pick up Outliers and I am relieved to report that I could finish it in a day too. I knew the outline since I had read Gladwell's related articles. This might have accelerated my phase. But I could certainly zip through the pages since this book also follows the same model of some simple good observations/ideas written out elaborately in a news paper article style. Gladwell keeps churning out these "academic lite" books that people like to clutch and talk about in dinner parties making him popular and rich. If you agree and haven't read this book, you can just read his articles at http://www.gladwell.com/archive.html on Canadian ice hockey players and  Christopher Langan or read the book synopsis posted at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outliers_(book).

Phew.. I feel vindicated and eligible to retain my snobbish notions for some more time, that is until my kids put me back in my place once again. :-)

-sundar.

Book Review: Collapse by Jared Diamond

Read Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond. Similar to his other famous book Guns, Germs and Steel, the breath of material he covers in this book is amazing. This is the opposite end to the kind of books celebrities & authors who churn out dozens of manuscripts produce, where each piece has some little idea or observation with a lot of fluff around it making up some 200 pages. Since Diamond is a Professor in UCLA, he teaches graduate level courses based on this book material.

This 500+ page long book takes us on a nice guided tour of current and ancient civilizations. It starts out in the Bitterroot Valley in Montana and continues on to discuss Easter Islands, Pitcarin and Henderson Islands, The Anasazis, Mayans, Vikings and Fugues, Japan, Somalia, Greenland's Norse, Rwanda/Burundi, Tikopia Island, Haiti Vs. Dominican Republic, Russia, China, Australia and so on darting back and forth in the timeline, geography and civilizations. (As usual India is hardly mentioned anywhere but for a line or two in passing. :-)

Underlying theme is that societies that thrive for several centuries can collapse precipitously just in a decade if attention is not paid to few factors. He distills them into the following five:

- Environmental damage caused by the society

- Climate change

- Hostile neighbors

- Friendly trade partners

- Society's reaction to its environmental problems

It may look like points 1 & 5 could be combined into one and similarly 3 & 4 could be combined into one. Still this gives a framework through which he analyzes multiple societies both in the past and present, some successful and many failed ones. His conclusion is that if we don't pay attention to these factors, our current societies are also vulnerable to such catastrophic collapse. Though some may argue that scientific advancement, communication technology and our awareness of what goes on in different parts of the world will allow us to react to changes to prevent such a collapse, he elaborately argues that it need not be the case. Compared to Easter Island society, we may be much bigger but that gargantuan size can lead to faster environmental damage that may be hard to reverse and a setup with a lot of built-in inertia to implement changes quickly. Globalization also ensures that no one is isolated from changes taking place in one part of the world. So, such collapses to even countries/societies like US are very real possibilities.

The comparison study of Haiti Vs. Dominican Republic is fascinating. While both countries are part of the same island and are poor countries, comparatively DR is in much better shape due to its policies where as Haiti is in miserable condition despite possessing same resources. In another case study he compares the lives of Norse and Inuit in Greenland. The Norse from Norway moved into Greenland and lived there for 450 years and then were forced out of existence completely not being able to survive, though the local Inuits have been successfully living in the Arctic for 1000's of years. There seems to be 4 reasons as to why the Norse vanished from Greenland.

- Fluctuating weather cycles. They entered Greenland during a mild period that was conducive to invasion & settling down but made them complacent.

- Their preconceived ideas of how to live based on the Norwegian society's living style and values helped them first but then lead to their decline.

- They looked down upon Inuit and refused to learn from them.

- The powerful, wealthy Norse had short term interests that were counter to their long term well being.

These observations seem to fit into the five point framework he provides early. As he works through the material the amount of information he throws around is quite impressive. There is a long description as to how the Inuit kayaks are custom made for individuals, thus converting kayak into something the Inuit "wear" as an extension of their clothing as one kayak won't fit the next guy in line. I never viewed the kayak in this way. In a different chapter he describes in detail as to how similar to cross sectional tree rings that are used to study the age of trees, pollen found in successive layers of mud is studied to create a record of weather patterns (how extreme snow was in a year, etc.) spanning decades, cross checking it with tree rings found in the same geographical area. Extremely slow and painstaking research explained well.

The last item on this list is perhaps the most important take away. As societies evolve beyond initial stages where everyone is involved in subsistence agriculture, a class structure gets setup. People on top of this pyramid were kings/queens/chieftains in olden days and billionaires today. This ruling class is usually insulated from negative impacts of their and the society’s actions. So, they become oblivious, fail to take corrective actions though they are the ones with power that could implement changes. They become more and more preoccupied with palace intrigues, fine-tuning laws to favor them, topping the billionaire lists and thus maintaining their hold on power. This “Let them eat cake” mentality might look like an historical artifact that cannot repeat today due to instant communication, democracy, etc. But how the near collapse of the banking system late last decade hardly affected the top bosses could serve as a clear illustration that it applies to contemporary societies as well. We can also argue that the collapse of the US Auto industry, the collapse of the railroad industry before that, collapse of the canal industry before that are all cases in point. In the end when the whole system/society goes down, it takes down everyone with it.

While the title and the framework may paint the author as a rabid environmentalist, he does talk in detail about specific MNC efforts to be environmentally friendly as it makes good business sense for them in the long run. He encourages his readers to strongly support such companies and points out Chevron's oil exploration operation in Papua New Guinea as one such excellent example. This book is certainly worth the read. In addition to this book, there are good lectures given by him on this topic available on TED.com site.

-sundar.