Our Moon Has Blood Clots

"The best in me are memories. Many people will come to life in them, people who gave their blood while they lived, and who will now give their example." 

- Anton Donchev, Time of Parting

How do you write about the past - about emotions and memories? How do you know if you are being objective? How do you know if your memories are even real, much less accurate?

Rahul Pandita's Our Moon Has Blood Clots is about the exodus of the Kashmiri Pandits from the Kashmir Valley in 1990. The book is necessarily full of his memories - memories that are more than two decades old, and which have probably been stained, for good or bad, by nostalgia and longing.

As a journalist used to sticking to facts and data (though he has written some great opinion pieces as well), it must have been difficult for Pandita to write a book filled with so much pain. He deals with the problem by sticking to the facts - as he remembers them. His language is cold, clinical, unemotional. In fact, the first three parts of the five-part book read like a bald robotic description of what happened.

It reminded me of something Akhil Sharma said in this Guardian interview, published after he wrote his intensely personal book Family Life:

he decided to eliminate elements of what he calls "the sensorium" resulting in minimal description of sound, smell, or feel in the novel

Pandita seems to have attempted something very similar. He talks about how the Valley was when he was growing up (he had many Muslim friends, despite the fact that the Pandits and the Muslims supported opposing sides during Indo-Pak cricket matches). How the atmosphere slowly changed in the eighties, how the killings started, and how the Pandits started worrying for their lives. And then, the exodus - the terrible choice between leaving their home, and losing their lives. And how life is as stateless refugees who have lost everything they had.

The tragedy is that this isn't even the first time that they had to move. Part 4 of the book, narrated by his maternal uncle, describes the earlier exodus. The family had earlier lived in Baramulla - their home was destroyed during the Pakistan-supported Pathan invasion of 1947, and they had to shift to Srinagar. And barely a few decades after they had picked up their lives, they lost everything again.

It's in the final part of the book that the dam bursts. All the emotions that Pandita has held in check in so far erupt in a flood - the pain of homelessness, the longing for home, the helplessness he feels in being unable to take his parents back home. It's this part of the book that puts everything else in perspective.

Though the book's sub-title says it's a memoir, I do wish that he had let his journalistic side out a bit more - he could have done some analysis on what caused the sudden outburst of militant activity in the eighties. Maybe it's tough to bring that level of objectivity to something that's so close to your heart, but it would have added a deeper layer to the book.

Pandita ends on a positive note. "I will come again," he says, "I promise there will come a time when I will return permanently." This seems quite optimistic, given the current situation - but we can only hope.

Stories

Neil Gaiman says in his introduction to Stories, the short-story anthology he and Al Sarrantonia have edited, "What we missed, what we wanted to read, were stories that made us care, stories that forced us to turn the page. ... We wanted to read stories that used a lightning flash of magic as a way of showing us something we have already seen a thousand times as if we have never seen it before."

That's a pretty tall order for any anthology. In my experience, no such collection is perfect - even a good one will have only a handful of good stories, the rest being mere page-fillers.

Stories is no different, despite Neil Gaiman's promises. Out of the twenty-eight stories it contains, about ten are actually good; another two or three are readable. I couldn't really find any reason for the addition of the others in this anthology - maybe the hope that the famous authors would attract more readers.

Some of the stories are mere sketches (Michael Moorcock's Stories, for example), others peter out halfway, leaving you feeling cheated (Roddy Doyle's Blood). Many are good ideas, half-heartedly executed (Kat Howard's A Life in Fictions). I got the feeling that they had been hurriedly written in order to meet an obligation or a tight deadline. At any rate, the editors don't seem to have done much filtering.

The story I enjoyed most was Joe R. Landsdale's The Stars Are Falling - a dreamy tale set in Texas that begins, "Before Deel Arrowsmith came back from the dead, he was crossing a field by late moonlight in search of his home." It's a twist on the typical zombie tale - one that involves lost hopes and mislaid lives.

Overall - you'll enjoy this anthology only if you don't let the famous names on the cover fool you. In fact, the stories written by the authors I recognized were generally disappointing (Neil Gaiman's The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains being the sole exception). Set your expectations low before reading this anthology.

Food Habits and Productivity

Image Courtesy: rageforst æsthir

Just came across this interesting article on how the food we eat affects our productivity. Many of the points are quite obvious:

Some foods, like pasta, bread, cereal and soda, release their glucose quickly, leading to a burst of energy followed by a slump. Others, like high fat meals (think cheeseburgers and BLTs) provide more sustained energy, but require our digestive system to work harder, reducing oxygen levels in the brain and making us groggy.

In the Indian context, I've noticed that people who have lunches heavy on rice and curd (I'm looking at you, fellow South Indians!) tend to be drowsier in the afternoons.

The article does serve as a good reminder about some healthy eating habits. For example, it's better to "graze throughout the day" rather than wait till you're famished before lunch. This sounds very similar to the weight loss advice usually given by doctors - "small frequent meals".

The author cites research that suggests that:

The more fruits and vegetables people consumed (up to 7 portions), the happier, more engaged, and more creative they tended to be.

Why?

Fruits and vegetables contain vital nutrients that foster the production of dopamine, a neurotransmitter that plays a key role in the experience of curiosity, motivation, and engagement. They also provide antioxidants that minimize bodily inflammation, improve memory, and enhance mood.

So if you weren't already eating fruits and vegetables because they're healthy, you have another reason to do so - they'll make you more productive at work.

Go read the entire article.

Time and Tide

Photo Credit: Luke Peterson 

As a young man he'd never considered time as anything other than a current to bear him aloft, propel him into his future, now he understood that time is a rising tide, implacable inexorable unstoppable rising tide, now at the ankles, now the knees, rising to the thighs, to the groin and the torso and to the chin, ever rising, a dark water of utter mystery propelling us forward not into the future, but into infinity, which is oblivion. 

- Joyce Carol Oates (extracted from the short story Fossil-Figures)

Contagious

Whether you're a marketer trying to sell your product or an HR professional trying to get people to do their appraisals on time, have you, at some point, tried to get a large number of people to talk about something and change their behaviour even for a short while?

If you have, then this book is for you.

Jonah Berger's Contagious: How to Build Word of Mouth in the Digital Age manages to attain the Holy Trifecta rare in so-called "management" books - it's readable, it's backed by research, and it inspires ideas.

Not just that, it also makes it sound like it's very easy to build word of mouth. Just follow the six steps and you'll have a viral phenomenon on your hands!

Frankly, I'm still not convinced that it's possible to build word of mouth using a "by the book" approach. But for what it's worth, Berger creates a very convincing framework of six S.T.E.P.P.S for the aspiring viral-er to follow. Here are the six steps.

1. Social Currency: People care about how they look to others. For example, if you make a club exclusive or secret, people will tend to brag that they've been there - thus spreading word-of-mouth.
2. Triggers: Top-of-mind means tip-of-tongue. Rebecca Black's horrible Friday song went viral because - you guessed it - people were reminded of it on Fridays! 
3. Emotion: When we care, we share. That Susan Boyle 'Britain's Got Talent' video? It inspired awe - and that's why we shared it. (I just watched it again, and it's still as awesome as before. Go watch it. NOW.)
4. Public: Built to show, built to grow. To use the simplest example, this is why brands have their own signature carry-bags. 
5. Practical Value: News you can use. Did you know that articles about education and health are the ones that people share the most? Because they're so practical you'll WANT to share them with somebody else. 
6. Stories: Information travels under the guise of idle chatter. If you tell me Flipkart has great customer service - meh. But if you tell me you ordered a product at 5 PM yesterday and got it at your doorstep at 10 AM today - THAT'S interesting.

Berger illustrates each of the S.T.E.P.P.S with an interesting set of examples, and cites enough research to make you believe he's got a point. All the S.T.E.P.P.S seem quite obvious at first sight (OBVIOUSLY emotion would cause more sharing), but he digs in and shows us the nuances (low-arousal emotions such as sadness or contentment don't result in sharing).

Despite my belief that it can't be that easy to create something viral, I have a feeling I'm going to come back to this book again and again. If nothing else, Berger's framework provides an interesting way of looking at the viral phenomenon, and his examples are sure to inspire some ideas.

Want to know more without buying the book? This might help. 

I Read Neil Gaiman's American Gods (And You Won't Believe What Happened Next!)

I came up with this post - what else?

I just finished reading Neil Gaiman's American Gods again and have been (once again) blown away. Instead of writing a long post about how awesome it is, I decided to have some fun by writing it Buzzfeed style - click-bait title and lists and breathless writing and all (I'm not great at finding animated GIFs, so you'll have to do without those).

Here are eight reasons you should drop everything and read Neil Gaiman's American Gods NOW.

1. For the concept alone. The book is based on what is certainly one of the best ideas in the world of SF / Fantasy in a long time. The idea is simple (and obvious when you think about it). All the migrants who ever came to America brought their Gods along with them - African Gods and Irish Gods, Indian Gods and Chinese Gods. They worshiped these Gods, fed them with their prayers and sacrifices. But today, these Old Gods are slowly becoming powerless, as Americans become less religious, and start worshiping new Gods - Technology, Money, Drugs, Media. And now there's a war brewing between the New Gods and the Old Gods.

2. For the characters. The lead character is Shadow, an ex-con whose sense of loyalty and justice makes you fall in love with him. But he's one of the few humans in the book. American Gods is like a Who's Who of Gods from across the world. There's Odin and Anansi, Anubis and Bast, Kali and Ganesh. And many more that I didn't even recognize. And there are other creatures too - there are jinns and leprechauns, dwarves and thunderbirds.

3. Because nobody can quite figure out what the book IS. In Gaiman's own words, "... it was given a number of awards including the Nebula and the Hugo awards (for, primarily, SF), the Bram Stoker award (for horror), the Locus award (for fantasy), demonstrating that it may have been a fairly odd novel and that even if it was popular nobody was quite certain which box it belonged in." Is it a travelogue, is it a thriller, is it a romance? Who knows, and - frankly - who cares?

4. Because it's on pretty much every 'Best Fantasy Books' list out there. Maybe you don't care much about such lists, but here's one. And another one. Oh, one more. And another one. These are just the first few from a Google search, by the way. But I guess you get the picture.

5. Because they're making a TV series out of it. I don't know about you, but I like to read the book before I watch an adaptation. But don't worry - they've just announced the series, so you have some time to read the book before the series comes out. I just hope it's better than Neverwhere, which was I thought was quite bad (here's a sample). Neverwhere is strange because the TV series came first and then the book, but the book is still better - which just proves that books are always better than their screen versions, no matter which one comes first.

6. Because of how obsessed people have become about it. In Gaiman's words again, "... you create something like American Gods, which attracts fans and obsessives and people who tattoo quotes from it on themselves or each other, and who all, tattooed or not, just care about it deeply ..." Here's the tattoo bit he was probably talking about.

7. Because it's so awesome you don't want it to end. And it almost doesn't. It doesn't matter whether you're looking for a quality read or a quantity read. American Gods scores on both counts. The copy I just finished reading (the author's preferred version) is 600-plus pages. And even with that, you really don't want it to end. You want it to keep going on for ever and ever, because you love Shadow, and you don't want to leave him.

8. Because it's Neil Gaiman. I put this reason last, but really - do you NEED any other reason? Gaiman is the brain behind Sandman, Neverwhere and The Ocean at the End of the Lane. He describes himself as a "messy-haired white male author trapped in the body of an identical white male author with perhaps even less-tidy hair". I also like his Twitter bio, "will eventually grow up and get a real job. Until then, will keep making things up and writing them down."

American Gods is probably the best of Gaiman's novels. READ.

Anita Nair - Cut Like Wound

Why aren't there more Bangalore books in this world? There's more to Bangalore than IT and traffic, you know. There are so many communities waiting to be explored - the Muslims who were part of Tipu Sultan's army, the Tamils who migrated when the British set up an army base here, the real estate mafia that springs up in any rapidly expanding city. There's so much waiting to be written about, and nobody's doing it. Everybody turns their noses up at poor old Bangalore.

Anita Nair didn't set out to write a Bangalore book. She just wanted to a write a nice dark meaty detective novel. But along the way, she manages to throw light on the dark steamy underbelly of Bangalore - an underbelly that middle-class citizens like me would have never known existed. Transvestites, corrupt corporators, gone-to-seed policemen, male prostitutes, young men hungry for sex - these are some of the people Nair chooses to populate her novel with.

A serial murderer is loose in Bangalore. A murderer who has sex with men and then strangles them with a manja thread (which is apparently a normal thread coated with glass particles). From the seedy by-lanes of Shivaji Nagar to the still-underpopulated places in Hennur and Nagawara, the bodies pile up, and it's up to Inspector Borei Gowda to figure the whole thing out (though nobody wants him to).

Gowda is a policeman in his forties whose career has gone to the dogs because he knows he's more intelligent and honest than his superiors (and doesn't have the tact to hide it). Gowda is a brilliant creation. He has a wife who doesn't want to stay with him, a son he doesn't feel connected to, and an old college sweetheart who's back in his life. Add to that an alcohol problem and the worshipful admiration of younger colleagues, and you have an interesting mix. Blasphemous as it may sound, I would put him right up there with the likes of Commander Adam Dalgliesh and Inspector Rebus in terms of complexity of character (for a detective, that is).

Nair's Bangalore is mostly restricted to Shivaji Nagar and the north-eastern parts of Bangalore - Banaswadi, Hennur, Nagawara. Lending local colour are things like the Infant Jesus festival, famous old Bangalore cafes, and of course the newer places like UB City.

The cover says Introducing Inspector Gowda. I hope Nair is planning to write a sequel (a whole series would be even better), because she's got a good thing going here.