2020: My year in reading

It’s been quite a year! Shut in at home for the most part, I should have been devouring books. Instead, I found myself endlessly scrolling social feeds, Facebook and WhatsApp groups that had proliferated. The scrolling mostly had purpose – keeping me updated on the pandemic, feeding me kitchen hacks and recipes for a ‘help-less’ world, motivating me to work out, even providing some voyeuristic fun. Reading was somewhat of a casualty.
I did manage to finish 56 books, a book-a-week number that is my normal in most years. But I went through bouts of reading block that were quite upsetting – and a lot of the reading felt quite forced. It didn’t help that I felt Kindle had decided to up their e-book prices, causing me to question the value of buying every book I read.
And so, 56 it was, even if I felt it should have been so many more. Here are the ones I was truly engaged with - my best of. 
1. Svetlana Alexievich continues to enthral with her reporter-style writing. Her Last Witnesses: Unchildlike Stories narrates World War II in Belarus (which lost almost a quarter of its population to the war) through the eyes of people who were children during the war. War is horrifying in itself, but is especially terrible when children bear witness to it. A great read.
2. Kantor and Twohey’s She Said is another great piece of journalistic reportage. This one is about breaking the Weinstein sexual harassment story and igniting the Me-Too movement. It reads like a thriller – and the courage on display, of the journalists and the women who spoke up, is inspiring.
3. Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem is an old classic I just got to in 2020. ‘60s America comes alive in this set of essays where Didion’s writing is sharp, evocative and masterful.
4. Stephen Fry’s Mythos and Neil Gaiman’s Norse Mythology were totally entertaining reads – the old gods are so human and so much fun!
5. Lisa Brennan-Jobs memoir Small Fry was a captivating read on a complex man and a complex relationship. Steve Jobs does not emerge smelling of roses in this one.
6. My favourite discovery this year was Hope Jahren. Her Lab Girl is a memoir, describing what it takes to be a woman in science. But it is also an ode to plants – making us see a tree as a unique being. And her The Story of More builds a case for less consumption – as man’s excesses are slowly but surely endangering our world. A science writer with a love for language!
7. Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet was a truly touching fiction read. I loved her gorgeous prose imagining the origins of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and describing the utter agony of grief.
8. Two delightful fiction reads were Guareschi’s The Little World of Don Camillo and Jane Borges’ Bombay Balchao. The former brings together a hot-headed Catholic priest, a Communist Mayor and a talking Christ on the Cross in a small Italian village in post-war Italy. The latter is a through-the-years exploration of a Goan community in South Mumbai. Both are funny and poignant with a great set of characters. Both were perfect for an anxiety-ridden time.
9. Two long reads, that took me some time to get through, yet were completely fulfilling were Maria Popova’s Figuring and Dalrymple’s Anarchy. Popova tells us of inspiring people – women and men who were geniuses in their own ways, who left an impact on the world. My personal favourites were Emily Dickinson and Rachel Carson. And Dalrymple made history come alive as he described a corporate takeover by the East India Company of some of the wealthiest kingdoms in the world.
There were other good reads. Ann Patchett and Alice Munro, Bill Bryson and Madeleine Miller, Elizabeth Strout and Tina Brown, Tove Jansson and Vivian Gornick. So in a very strange year, they were the ones I retreated to, for familiarity, comfort, refuge. They have rarely disappointed.

The Faraway Beckoning

Your reaction to a book is influenced by a number of things, chief among which has to be the time when you read it. Imagine you are in lockdown and haven’t stepped out of home for close to a hundred days. And you decide to read a book about a place as far away from home as

you can get. 

Barry Lopez’s descriptions of that wild distant place called the Arctic have a strangely calming effect on you - anxiety levels drop as you imagine the endurance needed for a tree to survive, or an animal, or a human being, in that most inhospitable world. “...the most salient, overall adaptive strategy of arctic organisms is their ability to enter a frozen state or a state of very low metabolic activity whenever temperatures drop, and then to resume full metabolic activity whenever it warms sufficiently.” It’s a lesson we can all learn, perhaps.

The world he describes is wondrous - where the concept of the sun rising in the east and setting in the west doesn’t apply; neither does the convention of a morning, noon, afternoon, and evening. It’s a world that strangely receives the same amount of sunlight as the tropics, but it comes all at once, and at a low angle, so without vigour. As much moisture falls here as in the Mojave desert, and it is available as liquid water, the only form plants can use it, only in summer.

The organisms that make a life here are far fewer in number - but they do exist.The muskox and the caribou, the polar bear and the narwhals. Lopez writes about them in detail, describing their coping mechanisms in an environment where survival can be so very hard. And then there are the people, the Eskimos (or the Inuit or Yupik, as we call them today) who have an instinctive understanding of the harsh, beautiful land and its creatures, borne out of centuries of interaction and reflection and observation. Lopez calls them the ‘hunting people’ and  takes pains to describe this understanding and contrasts it with Western civilization’s relationship with nature. This understanding he says is a ‘state of mind’; one that means you ‘have the land around you like clothing’, that you ‘release yourself from rational images of what something “means” and to be concerned only that it “is”.’ It is a very different take from how we traditionally look at the natural world. Lopez writes, “ Eskimos, who sometimes see themselves as still not quite separate from the animal world, regard us as a kind of people whose separation may have become too complete. They call us, with a mixture of incredulity and apprehension, “the people who change nature.”

Lopez also writes extensively about man’s quest to discover and own these harsh lands - that primordial quest for fame and fortune that led the western man to risk life and limb in journeys into the unknown, journeys that are quite unimaginable to us in modern times. The harshness of the environment has very little parallel - “No summer is long enough to take away the winter. The winter always comes,” he says. And even in late summer, he says, “Eventually the cold, damp air finds its way through insulated boots and wool clothing to your bones.” The will needed to get there and survive had to be quite extraordinary.

But ultimately, it is Lopez’s descriptions of the beauty of that extreme north, that made the book for me. To quote just one instance: “After dinner I went down by the water to wash my hair and to sit. Two silver-gray caribou were gazing at the far end of the river. It was so warm I was barefoot. In the hills beyond were the black dots of muskoxen and white dots of browsing arctic hare. The sound of the river was in my head, and its cold drops ran down my chest. A Chipewyan guide named Saltatha once asked a French priest what lay beyond the present life. “You have told me heaven is very beautiful,” he said. “ Now tell me one more thing. Is it more beautiful than the country of the muskoxen in the summer, when sometimes the mist blows over lakes, and sometimes the water is blue, and the loons cry very often? That is beautiful. If heaven is still more beautiful, I will be glad. I will be content to rest there until I am very old.”

At its heart, this book is an elegy, for a world that is most likely lost to us. Where modern technology has made redundant the knowledge of the land and its inhabitants that comes from living off it, using what is available in the harshness. This loss affects our relationship with our environments in a very fundamental way. It makes us look at our landscapes and the animals within as things to ‘use’ today without understanding the larger picture. And because today’s science allows man to, as Lopez says, ‘circumvent evolutionary law, it is incumbent upon him... to develop another law to abide by if he wishes to survive, to not outstrip his food base. He must learn restraint. He must derive some other, wiser way of behaving toward the land. He must be more attentive to the biological imperatives of the system of sun-driven protoplasm upon which he, too, is still dependent….” Lopez wrote these wise words in the 1980s. How much more relevant they are today!

2019: My Year in Reading

Goodreads tells me I have read a total of 18,309 pages across 58 books in 2019. Numbers do not tell the whole story, though. There have been years when I have read more, yet less satisfactorily. This year has been a relatively good year in reading, with a good mix of fiction and non-fiction, a number of new writers I will definitely explore further, and a couple of spectacular works I will treasure for a lifetime. So without much ado, here are my top reads of the year, in no particular order:

1. Kathleen Jamie’s Sightlines: I adore Jamie’s writing. This one has her doing her trademark lyricism on Scotland, its landscapes and seascapes. The essays are poetry in prose form.
2. Svetlana Alexievich’s Chernobyl Prayer: A Chronicle of the Future. The disaster from the trenches. Horrifying beyond belief.
3. Elizabeth Kolbert’s Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. We are in a mass extinction period in the earth’s history and Kolbert tells us why and how, in her irony-laced low-key style. Doomsday it is, for sure.
4. Tara Westover’s Educated. Grit, fortitude, courage. A memoir of incredible power.
5. Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai. My favourite fiction read of the year. Incredibly geeky, totally original.
6. Baburao Bagul’s When I Hid My Caste: Stories. Stories of caste inequity and life in the margins. Stories that need to be told over and over.
7. Nora Ephron’s I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts On Being A Woman. Ephron’s smart writing tackling women and ageing strikes close to the bone.
8. A A Gill’s Lines in the Sand: Collected Journalism. A great introduction to AA Gill and his wit, empathy, wisdom.
9. Siddhartha Mukherjee’s The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer. A long, compelling, scary read

There were more notables: Scott Fitzgerald’s The Crack-Up, his Esquire essays on addiction that seem so ahead of its time; Tina Brown’s Vanity Fair Diaries, a romp through ‘80s New York publishing, perfect reading for a celebrity junkie like me; Madeline Miller’s Circe, great characterization and a riveting retelling of a Greek myth; Pomerantsev’s Nothing is True and Everything is Possible, tales from surreal modern day Russia; Anthony Marra’s A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, a touching tale set in Chechnya that made me tear up in parts; Alain de Botton’s How Proust Can Change Your Life, bite-sized pieces of Proust, a man I will never read in my lifetime; Bakewell’s How to Live, again, digestible pieces of Montaigne, another man I will never read.

There were disappointments too - Ted Chiang’s science fiction (I should never attempt this genre), Ghosh’s Gun Island (even Ghosh can go wrong!), Ian McEwan Machines Like Me, Stella Gibson’s Cold Comfort Farm, Michael Dirda’s Book by Book.

But the good ones more than made up for it.

So, goodbye 2019. Thank you for the words. They made my year.

My Commonplace Book of Wisdom

I turn 50 this year. It is a funny sort of age to be. You know you have more years to look back on than to look forward to, your back aches in the morning, your hair is almost all grey (do not believe the photographs), your birthing years are long gone, and losing weight is a battle you have surrendered. Yet you can refuse to concede you are old - you run a moderately quick 5 km on days you hit the gym, the world and its people haven’t lost their ability to startle, you still dream impossible things.

So you think back on this strange thing called life and you wonder - just like Kathleen Kelly in my favourite movie of all time, “I lead a small life – well, valuable, but small – and sometimes I wonder, do I do it because I like it, or because I haven’t been brave?” 

I like my small, un-brave life. And it has yielded me some certitudes. The first of them being there is no such thing as certitude. (Pluto was a planet and now it isn’t, see?).  But for whatever it's worth, my version of a book of commonplace wisdom, an ongoing work-in-progress, at the moment contains this:

• The answers to the big questions - is there a god, what is the purpose of the universe and what is my part in it, what happens after death, and so on and so forth - do not exist (even if Stephen Hawking and Jaggi Vasudev act like they do!). All we can do is try and find answers to some of the smaller questions - what makes us happy as individuals,  how do we reconcile that with the happiness of the communities we live in, and that of the larger world.
• Since we do not know the answers to the bigger questions, it's best to treat every variable in life as a roll of the dice. Where and to whom you are born and the genes you inherit, the choices you are given and the ones you make, the earthquakes and tsunamis you avoid, the fall you survived. Your personal agency is just a teeny, weeny part of what has brought you to this place. Knowing this should make us all kinder. It rarely does, though.
• Wearing life lightly and yet being fully engaged with it - that’s the key to some form of awesomeness. For the anxiety-ridden me, this is a virtual impossibility.
• The pursuit of knowledge, for its own sake, is a worthwhile endeavour. It might or might not have anything to do with building a career. At the very least, it makes you a more interesting person.
• Religion is by and large a crutch. The trick is to know that it is, when you are using it.
• The older you get, the more you appreciate your body. Few things are more important than keeping it well-tuned. 
• There is very little downside to hard work and perseverance. It’s a fine enough substitute for outsized talent. More often than not, it gets you to your goal.
• There is beauty in the world. There is also horror. Philosophy can help in dealing with the contradictions. So can poetry, sometimes. Marcus Aurelius and Mary Oliver always help.
• Nothing gives you a sense of accomplishment as earning your own money. Knowing you are not dependent on anyone else for your basic needs is a key benefit of adulthood.
• Whenever, wherever you find joy, best to grab it. There are too many un-joyful things anyway.
• A hot shower is an effective cure for bad days. So is exercise.
• Learning some things early in life is important - swimming, cycling, playing racket sports. Learning them as adults is not quite the same. And going through life not having these skills is quite a bummer.
• It's important to not need people too much. Easier said than done.
• Niceness is an underrated quality. One of the best things to encounter in life is a genuinely nice person. And it's not as rare as it's made out to be.
• Moderation is key to long term well being. Call me boring.
• Most people aren’t in love with their day jobs. So it’s important to have a hobby you truly love.
• You take for granted the people who love you the most. As you grow older, you discover what a big mistake that is.
• It is important to feel deeply inspired once in a while. By people perhaps and what they have done, or by books or movies, art or architecture, nature or landscapes. And it’s worth going that extra mile or spending that extra money, to feel that feeling.  

And here is something that is inspirational to me - someone else’s life learnings, her own book of common-place wisdom, a site that is so totally wonderful, one that has given me new books to read, new art to see, new poetry to listen to, new thoughts to think - Brain Pickings by Maria Popova. Enjoy!

2018: My Year in Reading

This wasn’t a bumper year for me, even if my count remains slightly above a book a week (56 to be precise). Too many distractions (think Netflix, Prime, Hotstar, Instagram!), too many hours at work, too many vapid books. It means my favourites list for the year is a pretty short one.

In fiction, Russia was a recurring theme. I loved Amor Towles’ A Gentleman in Moscow, a joyous book set in decidedly un-joyous times - Russia in the first half of the 20th century. Benioff’s City of Thieves brings alive the Siege of Leningrad with surprising humour and tenderness without making light of the horror. Anthony Marra’s The Tsar of Love and Techno is very David Mitchellesque - cleverly interconnected stories, going back and forth in geography and time, all intensely touching, laced with a humour so very black. 

In non-Russia themed fiction, one of the notables was The Adivasi will not Dance, a set of remarkable short stories of life in the margins in tribal India - essential reading for upper class folks. Another was an old classic, Carson McCuller’s The Ballad of the Sad Cafe and Other Stories - the title story hits you like a sledgehammer and you remain convinced no one can do quiet tragedy like the masters of the American deep south.

Non-fiction had my only two 5 starrers. Jane Hirschfield’s Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World is an incandescently lyrical exposition of how and why poetry works. It’s a keeper for all lovers of poetry. And in the same vein, Kathleen Jamie’s Findings is a gorgeous set of 10 essays - meditations on birds, landscapes, cityscapes, prayer, personal crises. Poetry in prose form, I would call it.

Other non-fiction note-worthies include Olivia Laing’s To the River: A Journey Beneath the Surface - part travelogue, part memoir as Laing travels the length of the river Ouse (the one in which Virginia Woolf drowned herself); Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime, a breezy tale of his rags-to-riches story; Theroux’s The Old Patagonian Express, where he remains his curmudgeonly, judgemental self, as entertaining as ever; and last but definitely not the least, Tharoor’s Why I am a Hindu, a book that deeply echoed so much of what I feel about my religion.

And so onto 2019. Maybe this will be the year I finish War and Peace? I can keep hoping...

Spiti - Why It Should Be Your Next Adventure

The landscapes. Spiti falls in the rain shadow of the Himalayas. And so, like it’s bigger sister Ladakh, it is part of the desert Himalaya. What that means is, you get to see the Himalayas in a different hue- grey, harsh in a way the greener parts can never be. But those greys and the whites of the snow capped peaks, the deep canyons and gorges, the small whitewashed villages, the crumbling monasteries, all set against the incredible blue of the sky make for landscapes that inspire awe, quite like no other. 

The river Spiti itself. It looks like a wide stream of mercury in most places, the glacial grey glinting in the sunlight. Spitian villages are mostly on its banks, or the banks of its tributaries, and you are invariably following it as you drive around the valley. It’s rarely very wide, but you can feel its power as you gaze awestruck at the gorges and canyons it flows through.

The monasteries. Spiti is Tibetan Buddhist land. And there are an incredible number of monasteries, for such a small population. Most of them are set high up, a number of them are the oldest living monasteries and are crumbling, and each has its own mythology that the monks are happy to tell you about. My favourite was the ancient Tabo one, with beautiful murals on its mud walls that are not going to remain for much longer if the archeological society isn’t going to do something soon. The Kee monastery has a stunning setting and is probably the single most famous image of Spiti. The Dhankar monastery (Dhankar means fort on a hill) stands on a cliff that is eroding. And while it provides some spectacular views, UNESCO declares it endangered. 

The high altitude lakes. We saw 2 of them - the breathtaking Chandratal and the Dhankar lake that required a bit of a hike to get to. These, to be honest, are no comparison in size or beauty to a Pangong Tso in Ladakh, but surrounded by snow-capped mountains, these water bodies still have a magic difficult to ignore. 

The villages and the people. Literally hamlets, with each comprising of little more than a dozen houses, the villages are spread right across the valley. They are some of the highest inhabited ones in the world - Komic is at at 4750 meters and claims to be the highest motorable one in Asia, Hikkim, at 4400 meters has the world’s highest post office. The houses are white washed and they stand out beautifully against stark backgrounds. Given that the valley is cut off from the rest of the world for more than 6 months in the year, the villages house hardy but simple folk, who tend their sheep, cows and yaks and farm the little they can in a really short summer. They welcome you with smiles and happily offer you what little they have. Tourism is gaining ground and home-stays and guest houses are gaining popularity, but it’s going to be a while before these pretty villages become part of the mainstream. 

The night skies. We were pretty unlucky on this front in Spiti- cloudy skies meant little chance to stargaze. But one night in Tabo, we looked up and were mesmerised. I hadn’t ever seen this many stars or the Milky Way. We weren’t adept enough in photography to capture that beauty - but it sure will stay with me in my mind’s eye. 

The inaccessibility. It literally takes 2 days to get to Spiti - the European Alps have easier access. The roads are terrible and crumbly, it takes incredible driving skills to get there, you will have to budget for extra time spent on the roads due to landslides, and god forbid you fall seriously ill - the nearest well equipped hospital is at least 12 hours away. Combine that with altitudes between 3800 and 5000 meters, and you are in a place that is quite untamed from a tourist perspective. But that’s part of the thrill that is Spiti travel. How many beautiful places in the world can you think of that provide this kind of an adventure? 

Our 7 day trip to this wild gorgeousness was rough. As it should be. The altitude meant our day hikes needed to be taken real slow, to take into account the the low levels of oxygen. Everything that the valley needs comes in by trucks through high passes on almost non-existent roads. So the food tends to be simple (though Kaza has some organic restaurants) and was mostly dal rice and Maggi. Hotels were basic, homestays were rudimentary. We were stuck for 12 hours on a mountain road that had been washed away. For a middle aged city dweller, it all tends to come as a bit of a shock. And then you take a look at the incredible beauty around - at the grey, snow capped mountains and the sky that invented blue and the ever-present winding river, the blue sheep and the yaks, the whitewashed villages and the monasteries. And you offer up a prayer of gratitude, and recognize how lucky you are to be there at that time, that place. 

In Defence of Liberal Hinduism: Tharoor's Why I am a Hindu

The politics of religion forces one to re-evaluate faith. At least, it did for me. You are born a Hindu,
you grow up conditioned in the traditions of the religion, follow the rituals almost unthinkingly. And then
there comes a time when you feel you can’t defend it in the world anymore. Not when you see terrible
things committed in its name, not when you realize the contradictions within it (the caste-ism and
sexism, for example), not when you start to despise at least some of the people who proudly claim it.
Your liberal soul revolts.

Yet you want to defend it. Because there really is so much to love about it. Those rituals, for one - the
ones you cannot do without, the ones that center you - the lighting of the lamp every morning, the
reciting of the shlokas you learnt as a child, the visits to temples where you can almost feel the power
of the idols that have been prayed to, for centuries. And then what about the sheer beauty of the idols
and the architecture? And the joi-de-vivre of the epic stories you grew up hearing? The familiarity of
your favourite gods and goddesses, beings who are almost part of your family?  What about a
philosophy of the religion, one that you know vaguely, but one that makes some sense in this screwed
up world - a philosophy that preaches a universal soul, and looking inward to find oneness with it? Oh,
there really is so much to love about it.

Shashi Tharoor, in his book, Why I am a Hindu tries to reclaim all that, defending Hinduism against the
ones who preach a narrower version, an illiberal one, one that goes by the name of Hindutva. Part of
his book looks at the history and the philosophies and the route to today’s version of the religion.
Reading that part, you want to go back to the basics, re-learn Sanskrit, read the Vedas and the
Puranas and the Upanishads. You want to read Ramakrishna Parahamsa and Swami Vivekanand,
Radhakrishnan and Aurobindo. Because all of them just seem so interesting - as literature and as
philosophy, as reformers and explainers of a religion. You know there are parts that will contradict
each other, that there is a terribly regressive Manusmriti, but that there is also beautiful poetry, hugely
entertaining fables and philosophies for the modern soul. Tharoor does not shy away from the
contradictions - yet his take on them is the weakest part of the book. Because honestly, not even the
erudition of a Tharoor can explain away those.

He then goes on to chronicle the rise of political Hinduism and the Hindutva brigade. You read about
Savarkar and Golwalkar and your heart starts to sink. This is the most painful part of the book, and
you can feel the welling up of despair as you see how much destruction this pair has caused to the
fabric of a religion and a nation. He is soft on Deen Dayal Upadhyay and his Integral Humanism, but
is quite merciless on the others.

The last part is meant to be a call to arms, a totem pole for the liberal Hindu, a refusal to cede ground
to rabidness and the ‘Semitization’ of his religion. Here he is passionate and intense, and the ardour
is inspiring. Deep in your heart, you want to believe that we can do that - that we can reclaim the
vastness of our faith, we can shame those who choose to narrow it to a holy book and a few gods,
that we can prove to enough people our faith is ‘eclectic and non-doctrinaire’ and that it is the perfect
one for a plural society, since it never has to put down another religion to uplift our own. Deep down,
you want to believe we can. Deep down, you are not entirely sure we really can.