The Liquid Refuses To Ignite- Dave Besseling

The year 2014 wasn't the best year for me for reading. I have come to believe, for reading, 2012 still rules as one of my best year.

Fortunately, whichever book decided to come to me this year happened to be a good read. Another thing that I have come to believe is that, you don't find books, books find you. Many things in universe come together to present books that you were meant to read. 

With that bit of extraneous information, I must present to you, Dave Besseling's The Liquid Refuses to Ignite. It's is not about anything in particular except that it encapsulates ten years of traveling around the world, including Varanasi. Funny, subversive and anecdotal wisdom and sometimes self-depreciating humor to probe deeper issues around our existence. 

Dave is no less than a hippie disguised as a hipster with his constant companion he has found in Dr. Heagney who accompanies him sometimes but not always physically though at many other levels of companionship. 

"If Dr.Heagney and I aware of this crutch of a good life, how do we seek to experience the shock of a shit one to find. Some kind of balance? Self destruction? Liquor and drugs? would our lives have been better served with a dead parent? Serving in a war, being homeless for a while, having kicked a terminal disease, killing someone? Fuck knows. Do we consciously chase down surrogates?"

Besseling's experience in Varanasi will leave you deeply moved while he tries to find some semblance in one of the oldest, filthiest cities in the world. 

"This is Shiva's city, and guess which God is also known as the lord of bhang? None other that our host Shiva himself. No wonder he's always half-lidded barefoot and wearing loincloths and beaded bracelets. He is goddamn hippie dope fiend."

Fair enough. 

Besseling is not the one to go only in one direction. He is seeking wisdom in frustrations and deep meanings of life with equal irreverent panache. Perhaps, all their is to life is seeking, more seeking, till you become it. Who the hell knows?

"What makes India a spiritual place is not the idols or the gurus, but everyday shit you just have to let go off, make peace with, or surrender to. And it's a daily regimen." 

Or take this for example,

"Unsettling stuff. Unsettling to contemplate the Nazi state as educators. Perhaps most unsettling is the fact that though we can laugh at such things now, this may be part of our condition. The one our pampered generation has set to conquer: that certain detachment from real suffering, so often interwoven with cynicism, either that, or to be able to laugh at such things is a privilege, an intellectual elevation to be appreciated."

Joseph Anton: A Memoir by Salman Rushdie

Having read only two of his books, I was eager to lay my hands on this one, a book, perhaps triggered as a reaction to the controversy that surrounded the author for good part of his life. His fault, he wrote a book about a religion he was born into, Satanic Verses. He had not pleased the fundamentalists. But since when the artistic expressions were made to merely please our senses? Its about raising difficult questions, investigating the unknown and pushing boundaries through struggle to understand our presence here a bit more. With the fatwa in place and bloodthirsty search for Rushdie by Jehadis, it was only one thing that was left to answer, what will one achieve by killing the artist? Because, art or its remnants will remain here forever. Or as Rushdie says,

Art was strong, artists less so. Art could perhaps take care of itself. Artists needed defenders.

Thus he defended himself and was defended by others. In doing so, he lost a great deal and gained a good deal as well. Rushdie is not the one to sit back and mourn about the lost years, he is about making it up for lost freedom, suppression of expression and a whole gamut of evolution that took place when he was presented with this unique tragedy and dealing with it. The book is a detailed one of the years before and during the fatwa years. It's detailed, nuanced but sprightly, nonetheless. Its an emotional journey of his upheavals of a literary life, personal both difficult and beautiful relationships with friends, two sons, four wives, sisters,  parents and through all that emergence of the person he was to become. Its a story told well. 

He has been accused elsewhere of being ostentatious of his literary world in this book. Quite honestly, that was his world too and he has written about people in it, with honesty and with humility. He perhaps doesn't need brownie points for moving in that circle, he was it too. He admits somewhere in the book that the greatest compliment he ever received was from Jorge Vargas Llosa, when he said that, outside spanish literature the two authors he always keeps a track of are- J.M.Coetzee and Salman Rushdie. Precious.

His life was anything but linear and he painted many moving images of this being, of this migrated self. The uprooted existence that leaves you with the longing to belong in its most difficult form. 

The migrated self became, inevitably, heterogenous instead of homogenous, belonging to more than one place, multiple rather than singular, responding to more than one way of being, more than averagely mixed-up. Was it possible to be-to become good at being- not rootless, but multiply rooted?

With roughly 600 pages, book may seem fat, heavy, tiresome and laborious. It's none of those. It is stimulating, insightful, wise, moving and of course humorous in several places. 

The family was not the firm foundation upon which society rested, but stood at the dark chaotic heart of everything that ailed us. 

The soul had many dark corners and books sometimes illuminated them.

India was surrounded by unfree societies- Pakistan, China, Burma- but remained an open democracy; flawed, certainly, perhaps even deeply flawed but free.

And finally, its no defense but appropriate to ask, 

The Satanic Verses or any other book, no matter how wretched, what sort of Almighty could be shaken by the work of man?

Essential Rumi

I believe none of us are fully comfortable with words like soul, pure love and heart. And perhaps we never will be as we do not fully comprehend their workings. This could be, for all we know that there is something we do not know- something that we will never be able to fully know. Thus begins our spiritual journey, egotistical as it may sound, our quest to find serenity and beauty that comes from deeper exploration of our conflicts and confirmations. Essential Rumi can be an useful set of ideas that presents a philosophy which may ease one's strain and you actually experience inner walls of pre-held understanding crumbling, brick by brick. Leading you to recognize that our presence is perhaps a myth. And its left to us to unfold this myth,  our mystery away from rational. 

Look at this
just finishing candle stub
as someone who is finally safe
from virtue and vice
the pride and the shame
we claim from those.

Take an axe to the prison wall.
Escape.
Walk out like someone suddenly born into color.
Do it now. 

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right doing,
There is a field, I'll meet you there. 

Finally I know the freedom
of madness. 

No one who really loves,
loves existence.

And in that vein, Rumi suggests to dissolve your boundaries, pull and push and reach towards tenderness, of attempting to live beyond that may be undefined & unclear at this point, of sailing inside the inexplicable, drifting within your privacy.

Pamuk's PEN Speech

Bits from Pamuk's speech, in Other Colours:

Regardless of national circumstances, freedom of thought and expression are universal human rights. These freedoms, which modern people long for as the starving yearn for bread, can never justifiably be limited to nationalist sentiment, moral sensitivities, or hoped for international gain. Some of us have better understanding of the West, some of us have more affection for those who live in the East, and some like me, try to do the two things at the same time, but these attachments, this desire to understand, should never stand in the way of our respect for human rights. To change one's words, to package them in a way that will be acceptable to everyone, and to become skilled in that arena is bit like smuggling contraband through customs, and much the same way, even when successfully accomplished, it produces a feeling of shame and degradation.

Freedom of thought, the happiness that comes of the ability to express the anger deep inside us- we have already mentioned how honor and human dignity depend on it. Many writers we respect and value have chosen to take up forbidden topics purely because the very nature of the prohibition was an injury to their pride; I know this from my own experience. Because when another writer in another house is not free, no writer is free.

...

“What kind of idea are you? Are you the kind that compromises, does deals, accommodates itself to society, aims to find a niche, to survive; or are you the cussed, bloody-minded, ramrod-backed type of damnfool notion that would rather break than sway with the breeze? – The kind that will almost certainly, ninety-nine times out of hundred, be smashed to bits; but, the hundredth time, will change the world.”

~Rushdie in The Satanic Verses

Why Loiter? Women & Risk on Mumbai Streets

The book Why Loiter? Women & Risk on Mumbai Streets aims to map the exclusions and negotiations that females of various age groups and economic classes encounter in their everyday lives in urban spaces in the city of Mumbai. Authors trio, Shilpa Phadke, Sameera Khan and Shilpa Ranade have based this book on their 3 years of qualitative research and conclude that women’s presence and participation in public spaces and events has certainly increased but reserve that the city still does not offer equal claim into the realm of public safety in urban streets and spaces.

Why Loiter? Women & Risk on Mumbai Streets embarks on a significant journey on how a radically transforming city with respect to infrastructure and rapid construction, still continues to grant women only a status of secondary citizen by denying them complete safety at any time of the day. Provision of safety in urban spaces encompasses different understanding for women belonging to different economic classes. Woman travelling in a private vehicle from destination A to destination B has different safety level offered than another woman travelling from same destination A to B in a public transport.

As presented in the book, low visibility areas, poorly lit spaces, deserted streets and public transportation after sunset all consitute for unsafe environments. To counter, women alter their movement and restrict accessing urban spaces, maintaining a compromise. The book presents scenarios where this aspect of women in public spaces is so deeply entrenched that it becomes their second nature to modify their behavior. Examples like covering their chest with a book, file or dupatta, walking while gazing down and pretending to be on the phone while moving swiftly away into private spaces are common glimpses.

What is curious about the book is that investigates various economic and communal settings and how each is unique in providing different degree of freedom and social constraints. So a city, essentially an amalgam of various faiths and religion and cosmoplitan in its claim, provides a different level of freedom in varied communities. And women are not let loose from the clutches of moral policing in the name of safety. She can be letched, eve-teased, groped, stared and made to feel voilated, possibly anywhere. On the other hand, the same does not apply for men, as the authors point out. Men move about and expand their access to urban spaces more vigorously and more importantly any time of the day. Thus enabling more choices with respect to jobs they take up or engage in various social gestures.

This book presents scenarios of Mumbai’s changing landscape and how this emerging urban fabric could be flawed from equitable development and equal access to all citizens. And this is where I see authors blurring issues of gender humiliation to urban development. The two are distinct issues and a very organic development devoid of zoning has not been a solution either, as suggested by the researchers. Women’s safety in a city is not an unique Indian issue. Its rampant here could be a case of cultural baggage of gender hierarchy and its related perils.

On Steven Pinker's Better Angels of Our Nature

... despite the fact that there is such a thing as human nature, despite the fact that we have plenty of ugly, violent impulses inside us, it is perfectly possible to set up a world in which those impulses don’t actually emerge as violent behavior. This is because human nature is a complex system, it has many parts, and among them are a faculty of empathy, a faculty of reason, a faculty of self-control.

…change is now infecting the cultures of societies eager to mimic the societies they consider more wealthy, powerful and successful, possessing the ‘normal’ pathologies that go with success, including high levels of everyday violence. The rise in violence in a number of Indian cities has in recent years been spectacular. The South Asian euphoria over the nuclear tests, however short-lived and however limited in geographical spread, can also be read as an example of the same story of brutalisation and necrophilia. It reflects not merely deep feelings of inferiority, masculinity-striving and parity-seeking, but also a certain nihilism and vague, almost free-floating genocidal rage.

Excerpts from an interview on Better Angels of Our Nature and Why Violence Has Declined

José Saramago's All the Names

...In order to reach it, it might still be necessary to fight the dragon. This one does not have furious, drooling jaws, it does not snort smoke and fire through its nostrils, it does not roar loud as any earthquake, it is simply a waiting, stagnant darkness, thick and silent as the ocean deeps...

Senhor José, the protagonist of All the Names, thinks to himself, a thought flickering on his mind over outcomes of his dark deed, an inexplicable obsession about a woman, who is an absolute stranger to him. Can't say that it's a great book but I could not put it in bad reads altogether, either. There were some portions which I felt were little more than ordinary. May be I need to read some more of his work to appreciate better. Perhaps, all is not lost when you are left with neutrality. Although, there is a quote in the book that made a lot of sense:

After all, we were not born on this earth, only to connect with God.

Anything You Want

Anything You Want. A book by Derek Sivers. His first book. It's out there for sale, now, since yesterday, and its already down with 45% discount. Derek's post on Loss is something I have gone back and read multiple times. It's something I have treasured as an online discovery. Very dearly and closely.

Seth Godin on book's brilliance, here.

PS: Derek has also added my name along with others under acknowledgment for providing feedback/critique on the unpublished version of the book. So if you are one of my friends then you might want to jump and buy the book to see my name in there...:).

Songs of Sapphique

"I have walked a stair of swords,
I have worn a coat of scars.
I have vowed with hollow words,
I have lied my way to the stars."

From someone who also said,

"Walls have ears.
Doors have eyes.
Trees have voices.
Beasts tell lies.
Beware the rain.
Beware the snow.
Beware the man
You think you know."

Snow

"How much can we ever know about the love and pain in another heart? How much can we hope to understand those who have suffered deeper anguish, greater deprivation and more crushing disappointments than we ourselves have known?"

*
"There are two kind of men, said Ka, in a didactic voice. The first kind does not fall in love until he's seen how the girl eats a sandwich, how she combs her hair, what sort of nonsense she cares about, why she's angry at her father, and what sort of stories people tell about her. The second type of man -- and I am in this category -- can fall in love with a woman only if he knows next to nothing about her."

**
Both these quotes are from Snow of Pamuk which I haven't read. But quotes were worth scribbling down in that little gray notebook.

Madame Bovary: Gustave Flaubert

Before the wedding, she had believed herself in love. But not having obtained the happiness that should have resulted from that love, she now fancied that she must have been mistaken. And Emma wondered exactly what was meant in life by words 'bliss', 'passion', 'ecstasy', which had looked so beautiful in books.

From Flaubert's novel: Madame Bovary.

Coetzee's Disgrace

Harder, yet easier too. One gets used to things getting harder; one ceases to be surprised that what used to be as hard as hard can be grows harder yet.

David Lurie in Disgrace, a middle-aged South African professor in Cape Town reflects after multiple disappointments in his own life and circumstantial failures brought upon him by himself. He is resigned towards his life and makes no attempt to resurrect what he loses with a casual affair with a much younger student. He is reckless, we get to know as we are told about his disinterest in his job, towards his personal life and missing passions. He has intellectualized all the events in his life so far. He has been dismissed from his teaching job at the university as a consequence. After which he tries to move away from things, city life, its intricacies and takes refuge at his young daughter's farm. Lucy Lurie. Lucy has chosen a country life. As David reflects his move to his daughter's house,

But he is a father, that is his fate and as a father grows older, he turns more and more- it cannot be helped- towards his daughter. She becomes his second salvation, the bride of his youth reborn.

All is going just like country life, until that day, the event which shakes his calm and gives rise to only, commotion of feelings, of a protective father. His daughter gets assaulted and plundered physically. After which he is not the same and probably never will be. His quiet reflections are always towards the incidence or some aspect of it.

Menstruation, childbirth, violation and its aftermath: blood matters; a woman's burden, woman's preserve.

Not for the first time, he wonders whether women would not be happier living in communities of women, accepting visits from men only when they choose.

And since Lucy decides to choose silence over the event of her violation, he thinks,

They will read that they are being sought for robbery and assault and nothing else. It will dawn on that over the body of the woman silence is being drawn like a blanket.

The book is a quick one, stunning in certain portions, a page-turner with a certain distinct quality of narrative darkness. My gripe with the book: Coetzee skipping more detailing of certain characters, like Melanie Isaac the girl he has an affair with, never makes an appearance in his life and sort of strangely disappears abruptly. And then Petrus, farm neighbor to Lucy. It is subtly hinted that he is a complex character in all its simplicity and might have something to do with the incidence but rarely gets more attention.

Orhan Pamuk's My Name is Red

I haven't gone too far with this book yet, thanks to several failed attempt to revive reading it. However, this time, it looks like I will make it and who knows without a failure. Grouses aside, little bit from the book where Pamuk through his narrator in Chapter 'I am called "Butterfly", explains about Style and Signature:

As long as the number of worthless artists motivated by money and fame instead of pleasure of seeing and a belief in their craft increases, we will continue to witness much more vulgarity and greed akin to this preoccupation with 'style' and 'signature'. I made this introduction because this was the way it is done, not because I believed what I said. True ability and talent couldn't be corrupted even by the love of gold or fame. Furthermore, if truth be told, money and gold are inalienable rights of the talented [...]

Detail review shall follow once I finish the book, whenever that may happen. Or so I hope!

As a bonus, to all you handful but wonderful followers of my blog, I would like to pose this quote by Mario Vargas llosa. (See, I can be very kind and generous too, at times).

Prosperity or egalitarianism- you have to choose. I favor freedom, you never achieve real equality anyway. You simply sacrifice prosperity for an illusion.

Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground

I recently managed to understand what Orhan Pamuk was implying when he said,

It was as if Dostoevsky was whispering into my ear, teaching me secret language of the soul, pulling me into a society of radicals who, though inflamed by dreams of changing the world, were also locked into secret organizations and taken with the pleasures of deceiving others in the name of revolution, damning and degrading those who did not speak their language or share their version.

Above is quoted from Pamuk's views on Notes from Underground in Other Colours and how deeply he was impacted by it and how it was also one of the key readings early in his life to shape and shook his thinking. Pamuk's Other Colours remains one of the most important book that I have read to say, if, I have to be economical with words. Returning to Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, sample these.

Man has such predilection for systems and abstract deductions that he is ready to distort the truth intentionally, he is ready to deny the evidence of his senses only to justify his logic.

And what is it that civilization softens in us? The only gain of civilization for mankind is the greater capacity for variety of sensations- and absolutely nothing more. Have you noticed that it is the most civilized gentlemen who have been the subtlest slaughterers?

Our choice is usually mistaken from a false view of our advantage.

For if a desire should come into conflict with reason we shall then reason and not desire, because it will be impossible retaining our reason to be senseless in our desires, and in that way knowingly act against reason and desire to injure ourselves.

And finally the notes that struck me the deeply,

You know the direct, legitimate fruit of consciousness is inertia.

All "direct" persons and men of actions are active just because they are stupid and limited. How explain that? I will tell you: in consequence of their limitation they take immediate and secondary causes for primary ones, and in that way persuade themselves more quickly and easily than other people do that they have found an infallible foundation for their activity, and their minds are at ease and that is the chief thing.

George Orwell's 1984

Much has been written about this classic, 1984 by George Orwell and in all its sanity, justifiably so. I am glad to have it read and honestly it was easy as the book seemed to pace itself and pages turned swiftly and effortlessly. I hope no one misses this book in their lifetime. I was struck with its finesse, right from the beginning, where in opening pages, Winston Smith, the protagonist, contemplates about and pen and yet to be written creamy paper. He goes on to think:

The pen was an archaic instrument, seldom used even for signatures and he had procured one, furtively and with some difficulty, simply because of a feeling that the beautiful creamy paper deserved to be written on with a real nib instead of being scratched with an ink pencil.

To mark the paper was a decisive act.

All he had to do was to transfer to paper the interminable restless monologue that had been running inside his head, literally for years.

But he realized, even in his panic he had not wanted to smudge the creamy paper by shutting the book while the ink was wet.

And what follows in the remaining pages is nothing but similar genius quality. Don't miss it.

Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide

To me, The Hungry Tide, came across as a manifesto of complex relationships we human beings form with each other and also with, nature and its fury, as the circumstances unfold. Portrayal of intricacy through each characters ambition seems like Ghosh's proficiency he was born with which he uses with supreme poetic and romantic yet remains somewhat mellow in approach.

The backdrop, a vast archipelago of islands, the Sundarbans. Characters, Piyali Roy mostly referred as Piya, a scientist who hails from Seattle and comes looking in Lusibari (evolved from Lucy's abode) for rare kind of dolphins and not looking for love, at least, that's what she thinks. Kanai Dutt, a Delhi based businessman, who comes to Lusibari at a request by Nilima to fetch a packet written by her husband Nirmal and has been instructed to be given to Kanai only. And finally, Fokir, an illiterate man but who possesses deep unique knowledge of river and wildlife like no one else does. Fokir, rarely, almost never speaks directly to readers, since he only speaks Bengali and his words are often translated to Piya and others and thus to us readers. Yet, he manages to bind you with an emotional and enduring sympathic bond since not many understand his fiercely true soul. He, with his depth of knowledge and integrity to his work, persuade you that being truly adept and deeply involved in your field of work knows no barriers. His impassioned connection to the river, tides, wildlife have a spellbinding impact throughout his presence and even in his absence towards the end of the novel.

Once, during a conversation with Kanai, Fokir tells him, "truly honest people have no fears and have nothing to worry about." And this captures the essence of his character and his superiority over worldly matters and Kanai. who is once described in Nilima, an elderly and experienced woman's words,

"Kanai's problem is that he's always been too clever for his own good. Things have come very easily to him so he doesn't know what world is like for most people." Piya could see that the judgment was both shrewd and accurate but she knew it was not her place to concur. Nilima said, "Just a word of warning, my dear- fond as I am of my nephew, I feel I should tell you that that he's one of those men who liked to think of himself as being irresistible to the other sex."

To Kanai, Fokir once explains his inexplicable bond that he had and still has with his mother. To a nonplussed Kanai, a question like, "where do you see her face?" seems really appropriate. To which Fokir simplistic response says it all.

"He smiled and began to point in every direction. Here, here, everywhere. The phrasing of this was simple to point of being childlike and it seemed to Kanai that he had finally understood why Moyna (Fokir's wife) felt to deeply tied to her husband, despite everything. There was something about him that was utterly unformed, and it was this very quality that drew her to him: She craved it in the same way that a potter's hands might crave the resistance of unshaped clay."

The Hungry Tide has much to be cherished for its words craft and few things that cannot be captured in words, all said and set in a world away from this industrialized world which is again not devoid of multiple layers of human emotions. In his own words, Ghosh tells us, that words are like the winds that blow ripples on the water's surface. The river itself flow beneath, unseen, and unheard.

Amitav Ghosh: The Hungry Tide

Somewhere around half mark of the book, The Hungry Tide by Amitav Ghosh and it occurs to me that for me one long story goes much slower than long book of multiple shorter stories. I do not know why that is. Perhaps, some quirk about myself that I am unaware of. In any case, I am finding that Ghosh's writing is rich in texture created out of subtle texts and interrelated nuances and makes you want to go slowly, ruminating it, savoring it, bit by bit. I cannot say for certain that I will be writing a review later but few lines that I jotted down so far are here, shared:

The true tragedy of a routinely spent life is that its wastefulness does not become apparent till it is too late.

***
We were on the river, heading home, when the wind suddenly started up. Within moments it was on us- it attacked with that peculiar, wilful malevolence that causes people to think of these storms as something other than wholly natural.
***
In my mind's eye I saw them walking these thousands of people who wanted nothing more than to plunge their hands once again in our soft, yielding tide country mud. I saw them coming, young and old, quick and halt, with their lives bundled on their heads, and knew it was of them the Poet had spoken when he said:

"Each slow turn of the world
carries such disinherited ones
to whom neither the past nor
the future belong."

The Thing Around Your Neck: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Last month, I reread Adichie's The Thing Around Your Neck and had to make minor adjustments to my previously held perception of the author whom I had mistakenly put in same genre as Jhumpa Lahiri. The similarity seems small now between the two except for that both write immigrants' stories, their bottled tragedies, implicit sufferings and paradoxical anxieties that unfold in pursuit of a seemingly better life in USA albeit with very different methods. While Jhumpa is a pro in creating stories in the form of slow motion, detail by detail, never ending affliction, so much so that you feel gloomy and tortured during and after the end which certainly end but do not get over. That is probably her expertise and she does it with poised dexterity. Ngozi, on the other hand, produces sharp and witty narratives in a powerful story-telling format and you will feel like feeling amused at her sarcasm and subtle humor but you hold it as she brings it out along with profound understanding of cultural nuances and you muster your understanding for a right reaction. Sample this, from one of the stories, On Monday of Last Week in which Kamara, a Nigerian woman who has joined her husband in America takes up a job as a nanny to an upper class family and becomes obsessed with the mother:

She was still holding the phone; it had started to buzz noisily. She touched the PROTECT OUR ANGELS stickers that Neil had recently placed on the cradle, a day after he called, frantic, because he has just seen a photo on the Internet of a child molester who had recently moved to their neighborhood and who looked exactly like the UPS delivery man. Where is Josh? Where is Josh? Neil had asked, as if Josh would have been anywhere else but somewhere in the house. Kamara had hung up feeling sorry for him. She had come to understand that American parenting was a juggling of anxieties, and that it came with having too much food: a sated belly gave Americans time to worry that their child might have a rare disease that they had just read about, made them think they had the right to protect their child from disappointment and want and failure. A sated belly gave Americans the luxury of praising themselves for being good parents, as if caring for one's child were the exception rather than the rule. It used to amuse Kamara, watching women on television talk about how much they loved their children, what sacrifices they made for them. Now, it annoyed her. Now that her periods insisted on coming month after month, she resented those manicured women with their effortlessly conceived babies and their breezy expressions like "healthy parenting."

For those who want to know more about the author, I would recommend her talk on TED which will mesmerize you, that much I am certain: The Danger of Single Story.