To 'e' or not to 'e'

I am conflicted about my kindle. I use it a lot these days but I don't truly feel good about it, except in a very superficial 'I am with it' kind of way. I love underlining and scribbling on the corners of my books. I know I can make notes on the kindle too, but it is not quite the same as seeing my handwriting on the page. Plus, I love the way books clutter up my home. It gives it personality and bookshelves make great decor pieces. And long term, I hate to think my favourite landmark bookstore will one day disappear to be replaced by faceless online ones.
And then here is a different kind of conflict. Amitav Ghosh's new book is out. But it wasn't as yet in my bookstore last week. I saw it on flipkart and now I'm in a moral bind. Should I take away my business from my favourite bookstore and give it to that new-fangled online one? Truly, to 'e' or not to. That is the question.

Lightening Up

Here is a half-year resolution. To broaden things on this blog. To talk a bit more about life and a little less about books - though not talking books for me is kind of not talking life. To post opinion pieces more. To be less serious. To bring a bit more of real small talk. And be more visual. Hopefully it will bring me back to the writing more often. And you back to the blog as well. So here’s to a fresh new start.

Freedom

By Jonathan Franzen

I have come late to this one (maybe that's my specialty - I always come late to much hyped authors and books, so I have no need to drown the hype out). It's a biggie. It put Franzen on the cover of Time magazine and got the book and the author finally on the Oprah show. It's a big All-American novel, transmuting America's politics into intimate personal portraits, Republican conservative vs Democrat liberal, the Iraq war and the ordinary American's complicity in it, environment politics. But better still, it is a biggie for me personally. I fall in love with it and its flawed characters.

It is a story of the Berglunds, Walter and Patty. And their children Joey and Jessica. And their parents, Ray and Joyce, Gene and Dorothy. And the third leg in their relationship, Richard, the aging rock musician, Walter's best friend and Patty's girlhood crush who turns into a mid-life affair. Walter and Patty are the typical baby boomers, Walter, the 3M executive and Patty, the college basketball star who turns discontented housewife and mother. Walter is a good man, fulfilling his responsibilities as a good son, loving husband and father. His inner rage and frustration at his dysfunctional parents and brothers are kept firmly in check and is a challenge to Patty, the love of his life, who is unable to do the same. She alienates herself from her family, parents who hush up the date rape she experiences, a mother who does not come to her basketball games she plays so well. She is a jock in a family of East Coast intellectuals and ends up building a suburban housewifey life that is at odds with all that her family holds in high regard.

It's a story that spans three decades of American history. It captures college life in the late seventies, solid middle class America in the eighties and the nineties and the slow creeping moral turpitude of a war mongering America in the next decade.

The politics move into the storyline imperceptibly. Joey is the rebel republican in a family of liberals. He gets involved in supplying faulty equipment parts to the army in Iraq, embroiling himself in the corruption that is the war. Walter meanwhile ends up tainting his moral soul heading a wild life conservation trust built on money made through dubious mining practices. He does it because it gives him the money and freedom to advocate population control, a cause dear to his heart. He further taints himself by falling in love with his assistant, bright, confident Lalitha, young enough to be his daughter. And with an already Richard-tainted Patty, it's a recipe for a collapsing marriage.

Each character is acting out personal roles to freedom in contemporary America. Yet each discovers in his or her own way, freedom is not quite enough. Love, relationships, moral ideals, ideas that possibly tie you down, restrict you, end up being more important. Life has a way of leading you to that discovery slowly but surely.

Patty is the heart of the novel. Her inchoate frustrations in trying to find herself through her roles as mother and wife, her secret desire for the bohemian life with Richard and her ultimate realization of how much Walter really means to her form, for me at least, the best part of the book. Her autobiographical diaries written in the third person at once seem unnecessary (there is so little difference between her tone and the author's) and absolutely critical.

It's a big sprawling book. It delves into each character with such depth and intensity, you are left with a feeling of having lived each of their lives. It is the story of one family, yet it gives the feeling that this is what contemporary America really is. It feels like one of those stories that can be the face of a nation's culture. What American Beauty did in cinema, Freedom seems to do in novel form.

Franzen's voice is not particularly interesting. But his tale certainly is. It's a book to be savoured, immersed in, talked about. It took nine years for him to write it. It has been worth the while.

The Accidental Tourist

By Anne Tyler

Anne Tyler is exquisite. I reached that conclusion after coming late in life to her arguably best novel - The Accidental Tourist.

Macon Leary is a travel writer who hates to travel. Out of his discomfort from leaving home comes a series of guidebooks called The Accidental Tourist aimed at making people feel as close to home as possible in cities around the world. Macon is strangely eccentric in his infuriating normality. He is a slave of habit, afraid of anything approaching spontaneity, dislikes the new and is quite obsessively repressed.

The book opens with Macon trying to save a crumbling marriage after the death of an only son. His wife Sarah moves out, unable to cope with Macon's stumbling obsessive efforts at maintaining normalcy in a completely abnormal situation, accusing him of a lack of engagement with the world.

As Macon lurches back into the Leary home with his two brothers and a sister, a household where he fits right in with his obsession for order and correctness, in comes Muriel, the dog trainer, into his life. Muriel in some respects is the exact opposite of Macon. She is a young single mother, trying to cope as well as she can with a life that is forever slipping out of control. Her jobs are ad hoc, her attempts at giving her son a normal life are forever being derailed and she has a set of friends and family who seem as chaotic as her. Muriel inserts herself forcefully into Macon's life, making him re-assess it in a way he never has before. "Some lived careful lives and some lived careless lives, and everything that happened could be explained by the difference between them." Macon is finally forced to choose between the carefully lived life and the carelessly lived one. And depending on your own inclination, the reader ends up feeling he was right or wrong. And that really is an indication of how powerful a writer Tyler proves to be.

Baltimore is the scene of this small scale domestic drama. And Tyler is a chronicler of the everyday, of quiet, gentle intrinsically good people, of characters who are infuriating yet endearing, conservative yet eccentric. Her relationships have no loud flourishes, just whimpering confusing moments of unexpected joy, disappointment, fear and loathing. It is Austen-esque in its scale and acuteness. And the question the book asks resonates with mid life in ways inexplicable. "Which was better? Take all you own, and struggle to carry it? Or travel light, and spend half your trip combing the shops for what you've left behind?"

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

By David Mitchell

This is a long awaited novel. So long awaited that I bought the hard copy, not willing to wait for the paperback edition. Because Mitchell is an all time favourite. Ranks up there along with Murakami, Rushdie, Ghosh and Seth.

This is Japan in the late 18th century. A country so completely closed to the outside world that an outsider learns Japanese at the risk of being put to death. And then there is a tiny trading outpost called Dejima, outside Nagasaki. Where a handful of Dutch East India Company men are holed up. Dejima is the only small outlet of exchange between an increasingly colonised world and the Japanese kingdom. The Dutch have trading rights with closed Japan but are losing out to the other European powers - the British and the French, in the rest of the world.

Jacob De Zoet is a young Dutchman just come into Dejima. He is a Dutch bookkeeper out in the Orient to earn fame and fortune to win his beloved Anna back home. Brought in to clean up financial irregularities in the Dutch trading company, Jacob soon realizes there is little an honest clerk can do in the face of greed and temptation so far away from home.

It is an interesting cast of characters - a Dutch doctor dispensing Western medicinal knowledge to the Japanese in return for being allowed some exploration into a locked-to-the-world Japan; an ambitious Prussian clerk; Japanese interpreters curious about the Europeans and ready to profit from them too; slaves; labourers from Asia; Australian convicts; a hodge podge of people worthy of a Mitchell novel.

Jacob soon falls in love. With Orito Aibagawa, Japanese, beautiful, scarred, forbidden. She is a student of Dr. Marinus, allowed freedoms forbidden normally to women because she saved a magistrate's mistress's life and that of her son, during his birth. But the love is doomed. She is taken captive by a cult run by a monk wielding immense power in the capital. The triangle of Jacob, Aibagawa and her Japanese paramour who is also Jacob's translator is intense and quite heart-stoppingly tragic.

Parts of the novel read like a thriller. But there is no daring escape, no really happy ending for anybody. Evil is defeated but at a price. It is an autocratic cruel time that Mitchell describes. No one can really escape the tyranny of absolute power. Lowly bookkeepers, women, lowly translators, slaves... all are forced to submit to a class system somewhere. But world events do intervene to shape individual fates. A British warship in search of Japanese treasure attacks Dejima. Jacob's bravery in facing off this warship transforms his status. But he does not get the girl he loves. Nobody does. A magistrate's inevitable disgrace on not being prepared for the raid enables him to bring down an evil monk and his cult that had imprisoned Aibagawa. But he does lose his life in the process. And Aibagawa's hard-won freedom does not unite her with the man who loves her. It is a bit tragic and hopeful all at once.

This quaint historical setting is surprising if only for its rarity. Did you even know the Dutch were once in Japan? And why would this interest a globalised, digitised world today? Strangely enough it proves mesmerizing, with Mitchells' almost magical storytelling ability. He spins a very good yarn.

There is none of Mitchell's trademark gymnastics with point of view. He tells this story straight and with more than a little poetry. And makes you see the magic in the isolation, the enchantment in a Shangri-La-esque far corner of the world, a land of a thousand autumns. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet is Mitchell at quite his best. And so I would say, that means it is one of the best stories you would ever read. Such is my faith in the man.

God and me

The only instance I remember of my dad hitting me was when I refused to say my night time prayers. It is one of my earliest childhood memories and a surprising one. Because the person who was most influential in inculcating religion in me was my mother, not my father.

I prayed everyday right through my childhood up until I left home for life in a hostel. Most evenings I sat before a lit lamp in the pooja room, singing prayers I had learnt from my mother and reading religious books. I remember the temples I went to regularly and where I broke coconuts or performed archanas on significant birthdays. Mostly these were rituals I followed quite blindly. But sometimes they were bribes and sometimes deterrents to horrible things. I did not enter the puja room or a temple when I had my period. It was an unquestioning world I lived in. There was no dichotomy in my mind between religion as I practiced it and the books and writers I loved and studied or the politics I followed (I was quite sympathetic to the communist cause).

I am not sure as to when exactly it was that I became aware of a dichotomy. Maybe it was when I met for the first time people who were so confident about the non-existence of god. College mates who thought not going to the temple on your period days was regressive. And family members who used my religion as a means of driving a very divisive political agenda. And by the time I read Richard Dawkins, I had already begun to feel the ambiguity about religion I most definitely feel today.

It is hard to explain. I sometimes find immense peace in reading those thousand names of Lakshmi, the Bhagavat Gita, Valmiki's Ramayan, a ritual I follow by rote everyday. The last time I went to the Padmanabha temple in my hometown, I was quite literally moved to tears when I stood before the idol. My mind still goes to the devi in my ancestral temple in times of stress.

But more and more, I find myself looking at this whole spirituality business as a crutch in an increasingly stressful world. And now there are even more forms of it to tackle - the new age gurus with answers to all of life's problems, the vipassana centres, the strangely hypnotic 'secret' to happiness, all of that multi-million dollar self-help industry. I ask myself when does ritual become superstition, whether it is at all possible to truly know and believe in things beyond the rational, the tangible, the here and now. I ask myself if I would not be better off spending my time and energy in doing things that make me the best me that I can be, today. Honest hard work, perseverance, goodness as human beings - shouldn't these be enough for happiness? Isn't blind belief truly scary? And if belief is not blind, can it really be belief?

It haunts me; this question of religion and its significance in my life. I push it away and it keeps coming back. Years of conditioning do not go away in the face of rational arguments. And reading Nadeem Aslam's God and Me in Granta brought all that ambivalence rushing back. Skepticism is a good thing, I tell myself. At least it gives the world one less thing to fight over.

Gratitude 2010:

A surprise trip to Prague courtesy a training programme. A sunshiny summer Prague as opposed to an October snowy one on my last visit. Charles Bridge still as pretty, St. Vitus cathedral still as majestic, the Astronomical clock in the Old Town Square still as underwhelming. But there was also watching the start of world cup football with hundreds of fans , beer and bright sunshine in the Old Town Square, girls night out at Hard Rock Cafe and some fascinating insights into the big changes happening at our New York office.

Followed by a spontaneous last minute unplanned trip with husband to Amsterdam. The picture post card-ness of the canals, bicycles, the canal houses, the flowers, the road side cafes. The hard-hitting and hard-selling advocacy of the Anne Frank museum. The tawdriness of the red light area. The excitement of the forbidden in the coffee houses. Amsterdam was a delight.

A 90 year old grandmother. Her birthday bash. With cousins, niece and nephews from Canada and Hong Kong. And quite a large extended family. Fun. Food. Nostalgia. Old photographs. Old memories. Quite lovely.

A tiger in the wild. Overwhelming. The rest of the wildlife negligible and underwhelming. Ranthambore. Luxury in tents. A quick unhurried leisurely weekend. Just the kind of break needed in the midst of a busy work year.

Delhi as a tourist. Coming face to face with ancient quiet history at the Qutub Minar and Humayun's Tomb and present day creation of it at Rashtrapati Bhavan and the Parliament.Reverence at the Jama Masjid. The splendour of the Taj through the eyes of a first timer, my mom. My love of forts rekindled at Agra Fort. Just dad, mom, me, once again.

Decent work at work. An effie. New role, new responsibilities. Some great new brands. Not the best of years, not the worst of them either.