By, Of and For Book Lovers

There is something about words. In expert hands, manipulated deftly, they take you prisoner. Wind themselves around your limbs like spider silk, and when you are so enthralled you cannot move, they pierce your skin, enter your blood, numb your thoughts. Inside you they work their magic.

-- The Thirteenth Tale, Diane Setterfield

Book love can be obsessive and to a degree far greater than one might think possible for  something so benign as a few pieces of paper with some ink on them. But for those who know the power that a good author can wield with words, it is not a strange thing to imagine oneself completely lost. Reading a book about book lovers then, is almost like introspection. At so many points does one pause to say "Oh! I totally know where that feeling is coming from!" And so it has been with me. Over the last couple of months, I have completed two books based on a central character who runs or rather helps run a book shop. These books have engaged me far more, to the extent that I have forgotten meals (after a very long time) or other pursuits in order to finish them as soon as I possibly can.

The first was The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon - a recommendation and gift from a dear friend. It is a mystery novel of sorts where a boy, whose father owns a antiquarian bookshop, traces the anguished history of author Julian Carax and tries to discover who is destroying Carax's little known works. Along the way, the boy discovers love and friendship in unlikely quarters. While the plot of the mystery became predictable after a while, the book kept me bound by virtue of the protagonist's fierce desire to protect the last known copy of The shadow of the wind, the last novel by Julian Carax. As someone who fears the demise of physical books in the face of the advent of ebooks (there are many points for and against that debate an I am not getting into it here. Suffice to say that I love my paper books to the ends of this earth and have no qualms carting them around with me no matter where I go), I can empathise with the boy's anguish as he fears an author lost to the world.

Zafon's prose is beautiful as he paints Barcelona in shades of antiquity. It seems a world far far removed, untouched by technology, where friends meet everyday and lovers write letters (a lost art!). He manages to transfer the moods of his protagonist on to his reader (or was that just me) and so compels one to finish the journey so normalcy in life may be restored.

The second book was The Thirteenth Tale, an excerpt from which appears at the start of this post. I picked up this book from a list on "Best book cover art" on Goodreads. I fell in love with the rich cover and then the plot summary intrigued me. For once, I went in search of an edition with exactly that cover and though I found other editions with different covers more easily, I wouldn't buy them. The Thirteenth Tale, is about books and stories on almost all levels. It is the story of a famous but reclusive author who decides to tell her true story before she dies. Vida Winter has invented many histories for herself while she was alive but as illness eats away at her, she decides finally to tell the truth about her past to Margaret Lea. Margaret Lea is an equally reclusive biographer and prefers to write biographies of authors already long dead. Margaret's father owns an antiquarian bookshop where Margaret has spent all her childhood. At the time of Vida's invitation to be her biographer, Margaret lives in an apartment above the bookshop and spends most of her time with the old books and almanacs there. Vida's story eventually also helps Margaret deal with events of her own past that she has not yet been able to come to terms with.

As author and biographer talk, they reminiscence about their favourite books. Jane Eyre makes a repeated appearance as do Sherlock Holmes and Wuthering Heights. Books become expressive of personalities and behaviour as Vida's doctor recommends that Margaret read Sherlock Holmes in a bid to snap out of her winter induced depression. Setterfield explores how story telling is central to human life, how stories can be more powerful than the truth and most importantly how the telling and receiving of stories is cathartic. When Vida talks about the stories we weave around our birth, it takes me back to conversations with my parents as they described my birth and early childhood - moments that are not a part of my conscious memory but at the same time stories that I can now tell as if they were. The Thirteenth Tale hooks you in the dreamy manner of a book that promises to transport you to a different world. It makes you lose yourself in its folds by describing exactly that feeling of being lost in a book and completely cut off from the rest of the world. For any bibliophile, making the journey with Margaret and Vida, is at many points an introspection with the luxury of some outsider actually naming in words the way you feel inside when you read those words.

For that introspectiveness, I have enjoyed reading books about fellow book lovers. A genre that I intend to explore not for its plots but for the insight that it brings to me.

Hunger Games

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins is the first book of a trilogy. The story is set in an uncertain time in the future in what is now North America and in the book, the country of Panem.

Panem consists of a Capitol surrounded by 12 districts. Each year, to remind the districts of the consequences of rebellion against the Capitol, the Capitol holds the hunger games. Each district is required to send one boy and one girl between the ages of 12 and 18 to participate in the games. To win the Hunger games the participants must eliminate each other within an artificially created environment known as "The Arena" till only one of them is alive. The Games are televised and broadcast across the country as a show of the Capitol's power over the districts. In its setting and premise the book is highly reminiscent of  Battle Royale, the Japanese movie. There too rebellious adolescents are kept in place by a fight to the death.

The Hunger Games begins in district 12, the poorest of the districts with Katniss Everdeen volunteering to take her 12 year old sister's place in the Hunger Games. As a thriller Hunger Games scores full points. There are enough moments, nicely interspersed to keep you flipping the pages, enough to make me want to complete the trilogy.

As an exploration of war and its effects on freedom and morality it falls short. I would have liked to see Katniss make a few more tough choices. The book circumvents tough choices in fairytale fashion with the Capitol relenting almost too easily. Personal conflict is almost absent as Katniss hardly faces a dilemma that calls for her morals, actions or choices into question. What would she have done if it came to her survival vs. that of a friend? Would she value her life more than a past kindness? Would she consciously rebel against the Capitol and the powers that be? There is no choice that Katniss is called on to make that compels the reader to evaluate the ethics of war, dictatorship and rebellion; choices whose consequences are unpalatable for Katniss and the reader.

While there is promise of retaliation by the Capitol in the other two books of the series, I do wish this one had examined the personal choices that people make in situations of extreme stress with a little more depth.

A P.S to the Post: After reading the other two books, I think the only key character who represents the personal crisis that is created by war, dictatorship and rebellion is Gale. At the very end of the tale, it is his choices that are worth thinking about. I wonder if he would have played the Hunger Games differently as opposed to Katniss or Peeta. Sure would have made for an even more engrossing read.

In a P.S that is longer than it should be, I should also say that I think the ancillary characters add much more meat to the story than do the protagonists. They represent the entire spectrum of choices that people must make in situations where Peace is not an option.

The death of the villian

 For many decades Bollywood has had iconic baddies. From Ajit as LION to Amjad Khan as the unforgettable Gabbar Singh to Amrish Puri as Mogambo. They were unabashedly bad making no excuses for their actions. You had to hate them and in doing so love the characters. They often became more defining than the heroes themselves, stronger protagonists whose destruction became the raison d'être for the film.


Somewhere today this memorable character has disappeared. In the fuzz of grey characters there are no villians anymore. Only people with questionable actions and morals spanning the spectrum between black and white without being either. So much so that the category of "Best actor is a villainous role" has all but disappeared from award shows. 

One could argue that this is more real, more nuanced, that people are hardly all good or all bad; that it is time that Bollywood got more realistic and less over the top in its portrayal of characters. And this is an argument that does hold good. Films have gotten more realistic, less melodramatic and on the whole more relate-able. I don't think I ever believed that someone like Mogambo or Shaakaal could exist with all the fancy hideouts with women dancing in silhouettes. 


While I am all for realistic portrayals and characters who are relate-able, I do wonder if the blurring distinction between good and bad is what has led to audiences often complaining that they don't understand what the movie is trying to say. Yes, all of us are grey and by that token, grey characters should probably be easy enough to decode. Only they aren't; they aren't because in a two-three hour film, you get but a fleeting glance of their lives and their thoughts; they aren't because decoding them is too much work when you are out looking just for entertainment; they aren't because decoding them raises uncomfortable questions about your own life and actions. 


And lastly I lament the passing of the villain because I wonder if it also means the passing of the hero. Batman, after all, wouldn't be Batman without The Joker.

The meaning of modernity

Mom was here recently and we were having one of our long winding, jumping from here to there, no end in sight discussions and the topic came around to one of the things that almost always crop up - the tradition vs. modernity dichotomy and what it really means to be modern. Is modernity only about blindly abandoning your tradition/culture? All around me I see  two extreme patterns. One is an endorsement of everything western and the abandon of everything Indian. The other is a fanatical endorsement of everything Indian and ancient and a denouncement of everything western as decadent and morally bankrupt. What I see very little of is questioning. What I see very little of is true progressiveness and a critical thinking.

To my mind, the blind adoption of an alien culture is a sign of capitulation to hegemony and not a sign of modernity or progressiveness. Modernity, the way I see it, is the ability to evaluate what values are important irrespective of their origin; to be able to use all the access to information and exposure to different cultures that we have to our advantage and find a balance that guides our choices and our behaviour through life.

At the same time, unquestioning obedience to one's own culture, at a time when life and society are completely different from the circumstances in which the culture and its practices originated, does lead to a situation where one's values are often impractical to follow or implement.

What is important, then, is to understand the larger purpose that a culture and a value system serves in preserving a civilization. Value systems are an ordering influence, a compass to align individual behaviours to be non-conflicting. They encompass broad values that determine the direction that a society or civilization takes, its attitudes towards production, distribution and consumption, its notions of right and wrong, of justice. It comes not with the legal sanction of the station but the moral sanction of the people who chose to follow it.

In that larger abstract framework, modernity lies not in the blind adoption of a system based on its origins but in the ability to recognize values that are universal, that benefit humanity beyond national borders and that provide support and direction in times of tension, dilemmas and choice.

More about Singapore - of winding lanes, dolphin hoops and deceiving flowers

Once I got back from Bali and was fully recovered, which by itself took a full day, I got a chance go around Singapore and explore somewhat. My experience of Singapore proper started with Arab street. Sister and her friends took me there for a lovely sit down dinner and I happily gobbled my way through lots of hummus and foul (now the name might be a tad deceptive there but it's actually a pretty tasty dish made with dried fava beans and loads of olive oil!) amid much conversation and merriment. But what really does catch the eye about Arab Street is the funky street art. The brightly painted walls of roadside cafes add a lot of character and much excitement at chancing upon something quirky as you wander through these little winding lanes (I doubt I could find my way around that place again!).

Singapore, by the way, is a foodie's delight. There's all the "stall" food, the food courts serving all sorts of Asian food and lots of lovely little restaurants. My favourite, and I regret not having my camera along as I went to meet a friend for dinner, was Marche's. A swiss eatery, more than the food, or the "pick what you want" from different counters, what I loved was the way the whole place was done up. Under the streets of Singapore, Marche's had recreated Heidi's farm - complete with vegetable and fruit cards piled high with veggies and fruits to a little barn - all in lovely wood and warm hues. The place looks so inviting that even someone stuffed like a Turkey would feel hungry there. In fact, I really do regret not taking more pictures of Singapore, the city.

But well... coming back to my chronological chronicle, after the night spent at Arab Street, I behaved like a good tourist and decided to make my way to Sentosa. So on to the MRT I got and headed straight to Vivo City. Apart from being the mall from where one takes the train to Sentosa, the star attraction for me at Vivo City was the Nat Geo store. I was all but lost in there for a couple of hours and after glumly picking up just one book (weight and cash constraints you see) I had to literally throw myself out of the place. I would have gladly spent the entire day in there browsing through all the photographs, magazines, books and maps they had in there. However, I did have an agenda for the day and so with another longing glance at the store, I left and went up the escalators and got myself on the monorail to Sentosa.

Sentosa looks very impressive from afar but as you draw closer the artificiality of it all starts to seep through. It's not the kind of beauty that I particularly appreciate. I'd prefer nature to do it's own thing, a little wild and unsculpted. Man trying to imitate nature at her own game is, to me, a bit of a losing battle. We are better off building steel and glass skyscrapers or the Taj as monuments to our skills. The imported silver sand beaches are nice to walk on but I much prefered Coronado, an island off the coast of San Diego, for that or even Goa simply because they are natural... the sands there belong there and the little rocky outcrops create delicious pools of water in which to wiggle your toes.

Anyhow, there I was at Sentosa and after a little bit of random ambling around I decided to head to Underwater world. Once again a pretty big disappointment. I was done touring the entire place in half an hour flat. After Monterey bay aquarium, a definite let down. Apart from the size, the thing that really disappointed me here was the lack of any substantial information near any of the displays and the complete lack of respect that visitors seemed to be showing towards the creatures. So out I walked into the sunshine and plonked myself with a cheese sandwich and my book (recently bought at the Nat Geo store) on the beach outside Underwater world to wait for the Dolphin and Fur seal shows.

This was the highlight of going to Sentosa for me. The pink dolphins and the fur seals are absolutely absolutely cute and adorable. Nothing in a picture or a film comes close to how you feel when you see their "smiling" (dolphins) and expressive (fur seals) faces up front. The show however generated mixed feelings in me. To be absolutely honest, I'd never end up seeing any of the animals up close except in a zoo/aquarium. I don't think I have the enthusiasm to go looking for them in their natural habitats. But watching them being made to do tricks to loud rock music with little fish being tossed to them as motivation for our amusement somehow seemed to make a mockery of their existence. It seemed to me that they were being made to earn their keep. Not fair... since humans are the ones merciless destroying their natural habitats in the first place. I'd be far happier to just watch them swim or waddle around at will. The fur seals also seemed to have similar thoughts as one of them completely refused to move and perform his bag of tricks mid-way into the show and needed much massaging and coaxing to get him moving again.

At this point, I got a call from sister's friend saying she was going to the botanical gardens to take some pictures. Since I'd been planning to visit the gardens myself and I was more or less done at Sentosa and in fairly low spirits, off I went. The Botanical Gardens, I am glad to say, was a lovely end to a day that I would have otherwise written off. Rolling hills, soft grasses, lakes tucked away behind huge trees and wonder of wonders... an entire sprawling section devoted to Orchids!!!

Now I should tell you, Orchids are my favourite flowers. I love them for the vibrancy of their colors, especially that vivid blue, and for the delicacy of their structure. They seem so frail and yet they are amongst the hardiest of flowers. And then this article in an issue of the National Geographic gave me even more reason to be fascinated by this highly diverse family of flowers. So imagine my happiness when I saw a signboard that said National Orchid Garden! Oh the sheer joy of it!!! Happy to pay the entry price and glad that I was carrying a spare battery and memory card for my camera, I joyously ran along and dragged friend also along. We clicked and chatted the evening through in, what was for me at least, complete bliss. As the sun set and more photography became impossible, two tired but happy girls headed home with plans to come back for sunrise the next morning. We did amaze ourselves by actually making it there for sunrise the next day and we shot the swans and wooden gazebos covered in creepers in that magic morning light. A hearty breakfast of fresh fruits and coconut water later we crashed and then saw only the Singaporean evening thereafter.

PS: Links in the article lead to the photo albums (except for the nat geo article link). So please do click on them :)

                                                                                                                                 Bali