Love by Toni Morrison

An utterly brilliant book of love and hate sitting inseparably, two sides of an indivisible coin.

The story of Christine and Heed two childhood friends, who had a stake driven through their friendship by strangest of twists of fate and adults too consumed with their own desires and hurts to care for anything else. It is the story of the stamina that hate can develop once it is allowed to enter our beings. And how its slow fire always goes on consuming everything around it, the hater more than anything else. It is also about the power of love - no matter how dormant - to douse that smoldering hate, just as a bucketful of sugar can 'caramelize' a slow fire.

As in The Bluest Eye, Morrison invades several souls with consummate mastery and rides feelings and emotions with complete ownership. And as she goes on chiseling her characters - the rapacious Junior, the honorable Ronnen, the lustful Mr Cosey who owns the hotel (and the centre of this story), the mysterious L and, of course the duo of Heed and Christine.

It is a story that teases one truth after out after another till the entire suspense is unraveled in the end. The imagery is evocative and powerful, each comparison a delight.

A powerful book indeed.      

Levels of Life by Julian Barnes

I must admit that initially I did not entirely get this book. “You put together two things that have not been put together before. And the world is changed” begins this short novel. And more than two things are put together in the story, indeed more than two stories that do not intersect, except in the passing. What does develop is a theme; of longing and the perennial ache of the aftermath of loss. And to carve this tale of love and loss The Levels of Life relies on stories from the early days of ballooning and aerial photography. In the very end, Barnes moves into a most luminous terrain, the one inside him, and unfolds a devastating landscape of grief.

The depth of the feeling of loss, the stark relief in which it is etched, the universality of emotion it evokes even in someone who has not experienced it firsthand, the bottomless pain that must alternate between a dull throb and sharp infliction – both equally unbearable – are so obviously autobiographical. Indeed the inside cover informs us of the early passing away of Barnes’ wife Pat Kavanagh who married him in 1979 and died in 2008.

Unlike Barnes' The Sense of an Ending, the story here is not linear. Indeed, it is largely bereft of a plot but still flows like a silent stream.

It is clearly a work of deep and abiding love. Such is the heartfelt-ness of the contours of pain that one feels envious of the love that must have been shared in its wake. The accolades from critics are fulsome and surely well-deserved. And even though I could not get the point of the story early on, I came away deeply moved in the end. 

Anticipating India - the Best of National Interest by Shekhar Gupta

I have been a loyal reader of National Interest columns (Indian Express) by Shekhar Gupta. Week after week, I have enjoyed his brilliant analysis of our contemporary political landscape. His style is always simple - but never simplistic.

Anticipating India is a collection of 'the best'of National Interest. It traces the period from the days of the NDA government right up to the Anna Hazare movement. It is a succulent slice of history on one platter!

I was struck by how accurate Shekhar Gupta's predictions turned out and how perceptive he was in his analysis, even if some of it then appeared to be on a shaky terrain. He had started predicting the decline and demise of the UPA II government when - to put it in an analogy from his favourite sport of cricket - the opening batsmen had barely taken guard. Over the last five years, he persisted in the belief that the UPA was on a self-destruct mode. It was chronicle of a death foretold!

Of course he appears to have got a few things wrong. He considered the selection of Amit Shah as organizer of BJP's UP campaign a blunder because Mr Shah was known to be a divisive and polarizing figure. The last elections proved this prediction hugely wrong! To be fair, the reason lay in the fact that Mr Shah and his party appeared to have re-invented themselves and approached issues far less divisively than anyone thought was possible.

This is an excellent book for anyone who understands the nuances of Indian politics and wishes to make sense of the last two decades. 

What This Blog is About

Since May 2009, in five years, I wrote 93 blog posts in five indifferently and sporadically fed blogs.

Under Blue African Skies perhaps gave me the greatest satisfaction, written as it was from Lesotho. It was a lean blog and had a leaner readership.

Blurs and Bright Spots began as a this-and-that blog but soon acquired an identity - a collection of book reviews.

The Summing Up was meant to sum up my experiences of life. It ran aground, not unlike many other projects I have undertaken.

A Hitch Hiker's Guide to Inner Self was meant to trace my inner journey.

Balis' Blog was about our family.'I doubt if many in the family read it!

I decided to merge all those posts into this blog - for record.

Self-Deception: India’s China Policies – Origins, Premises, Lessons by Arun Shourie

Focus on India’s relations with China never recedes to a point where the contents of a book on it become anything less than riveting. Add to it meticulous research and scholarship of an author like Arun Shourie and you have an absorbing read on your hands. Self-Deception: India’s China Policies – Origins, Premises, Lessons turns its spotlight largely on the history of our diplomatic handling of China, especially by the first Prime Minister Jawahar Lal Nehru. It does traverse the more contemporary ground too, albeit briefly.

The central theme of the argument has been this: our handling of relations with China has been extremely inept and self-deluding. We have lived – and continue to do so – in a bubble of denial, often ignoring signs of clear and present danger. In the 50s, we somehow convinced ourselves that there was no pending border issue with China, that somehow our supplicant acceptance of China’s annexation and absorption of Tibet had bought us a permanent seat on the table of friendship, that the Chinese leadership was dependent on our sagacity for learning the nuances of diplomacy and that every Chinese aggressive or hostile move needed to be explained away by us lest the country became anxious! It appeared that we had forgotten that self-generated ‘hope’ should hardly be the sole pillar of foreign policy.

The book solidly relies on documentation. Letters from Prime Minister Nehru to the Chief Ministers, minutes of meeting between Nehru and Chou En Lai and speeches in the parliament have been quoted extensively. There is little to redeem us in those documents.

Many years ago I had read Neville Maxwell’s India’s China War. The conclusions that Maxwell had reached regarding our diplomatic handling of the border dispute were exactly the same. This book provided me with a gloomy confirmation.

Have things changed since? I wish there were reassuring signs but neither the book nor media reports provide us with any. Only recently we described a blatant Chinese intrusion thus: “one little spot is acne, which cannot force you to say that this is not a beautiful face... that acne can be addressed by simply applying an ointment.”

When Arun Shourie was the editor of the Indian Express, he was known for outstanding investigative journalism. Indeed, he was the pioneer in that form of print-media, one who unerringly dug up facts and presented his reports without fear. Later, even as a Union Minister he was known for his competence and probity. All this is reflected in his writing.

The book is highly recommended for anyone with an interest in the trajectory of relations between China and India – and the course correction that ought to be applied.

The Accidental Prime Minister: the Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh by Sanjaya Baru

At the very end of his book, Sanjaya Baru, who worked at close quarters with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh as his Media Adviser during UPA 1 from 2004 to 2009, draws analogies from the Mahabharata to summarise Dr. Manmohan Singh’s success as a leader. He rubbishes the analogy that Manmohan Singh had been like Shikhandi – the half man half woman character who shielded Arjuna during battle with Bheeshma; it was common knowledge that the latter would not strike against a woman and could it be that Manmohan too shielded his party from attacks with stoic silence? This characterisation was initially attributed to BJP’s Yashwant Sinha. Baru disagrees. He also wonders if Manmohan Singh could be likened to Dhritrashtra, the blind king who unhappily presided over his strife-torn kingdom, ignoring the wrongs. Going further on this mythological journey, Baru favours a comparison of his boss with Bheeshma himself; for all his brilliance, Bheeshma had been mocked by Dropadi for taking refuge of finer points of religion when he could not defend her while she was disrobed in public. Was Dr. Manmohan Singh the Bheeshma who presided over scams while maintaining the highest standards of personal probity due to a misplaced sense of loyalty?

For five years, Sanjaya Baru was privy to a slice of history as it was made. His book reveals what he saw though, as many have pointed out, the overall picture of Prime minister Manmohan Singh that emerges is not radically different from the popular perception of him as an honest and dedicated man, self effacing, humble and decent, whose failure lay in lack of display of leadership qualities and who allowed the Party (‘the Family’) dictate the narrative. To Baru, the subservience of this scholar was baffling and he concludes that it was a stratagem for his own political survival. This may be an unkind deduction but Baru makes it with a hint of exasperation and sadness.

But contrary to the popular uproar in the media, the book is not entirely unkind to Dr. Manmohan Singh. On the contrary, in most part, it unreservedly extols the Prime Minister and credits him both the victory of UPA 1 in 2009 and the Indo-US Nuclear deal. Baru is mostly affectionate in his tone towards Manmohan Singh and severely critical of those who were malevolent in their intent towards the Prime Minister. Among the many who do not come out well from these pages are Karat of CPM, Mani Shankar Iyer, Prithviraj Chavan, Natwar Singh and, of course, the Family.

The book makes an attempt to redress the balance of history in Manmohan Singh’s favour. But that alone is not clearly the purpose of the book because it also shines light on Manmohan Singh’s warts and moles. To a lay reader, it appears to be a balanced account, though this is hardly a characterisation that anyone from Congress would agree with. Many in the ruling party have already painted Baru as a back-stabber, someone who chose the period of General Elections when the Congress party is battling for survival, to release this book. I can’t agree – isn’t that how books are timed for release?

The Accidental Prime Minister – a rather accurate title – is an easy read. It is not a story with dramatic twists and a red-hot plot. All the same, it is a gripping account and provides part of the explanation why the Congress is staring down the barrel today.

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Khushwant Singh (1915-2014)

In 1978, Khushwant Singh wrote an article in the Illustrated Weekly of India, whose eminently successful editor he was, on the passing away of his father Sobha Singh. In 'On Losing a Parent' Khushwant Singh celebrated the fact that his father died nursing a scotch. 

I was 20 and drawn to every word he wrote. I penned him a short letter of condolence and posted the Inland letter care of the Times of India address on Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg in Delhi. I ended the letter with a suggestion that since I could visualise how busy he must be, the letter need not be replied. In any event, given the state of postal service and the perception I had of 'celebrities' I was sure that no mail was ever likely to arrive in return. 

I promptly received a reply that ended with the exhortation for the Guru to shower his blessings upon me. After this, we exchanged a couple of mails and I finally met him in Delhi when he was the editor of 'New Delhi', a magazine that subsequently failed to respond to his Weekly magic. A little earlier, the management of the Weekly had ejected him and handed its reins over to the anti-septic M V Kamath, a move that drowned the iconic magazine without a trace. 

He was courteous and direct. We spent 15 minutes discussing this and that - surely completely inconsequential talk for him. A sample: "Which is the main tribe where you are in NEFA?" "Sir, Mishmi." Änd which religion do they follow?", he asked. I was stumped. "I don't think they follow any religion Sir." "That is very healthy.", he said very seriously.

He saw me off at the door of his office and left an indelible mark on my young mind. 

I met him again in 1999 and when I reminded him of that meeting, though he hesitatingly claimed to recall, I suspect he was only being nice.

Khushwant Singh has moved on. He was 99. He missed a century but I am certain a century or more will miss him. To me he was one of the most delightful human beings of our times, a real character who spoke his mind, courted controversy without fear and lived his life to the fullest. 

Light has just gone out of the Bulb. 

RIP Khushwant Singh (02 Feb 1915 - 20 Mar 2014).

 

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David and Goliath – Underdogs, Misfits and the Art of Battling Giants by Malcolm Gladwell

Malcolm Gladwell always makes for entertaining reading. He takes an idea – or two – and proceeds to demolish conventional wisdom built around it with a barrage of carefully selected statistics and persuasive anecdotal narrative. And there is a tantalizing element of self-help woven into the theory; remember the prescription of devoting 10000 hours to one’s chosen pursuit to reach the end of the rainbow, in Outliers? It is sociology’s pop version at its appealing best.

But does all he has to say stand rigorous scrutiny? The best that can be said is that the jury will always be out on some of his hypotheses. In the meanwhile, the believers and laymen like me will eagerly lap up his offerings. That is how his previous works ‘The Tipping Point’, ‘Blink’, Outliers’ and ‘What the Dog Saw’ were received and the book under review ‘David and Goliath’ has similarly found enough readers to scale every prominent Bestseller List.

The central theme of the book is that the ‘weak’ need not lose – indeed their disadvantages are not what they appear to be. It is entirely a question of understanding what an advantage or disadvantage really is, the limits that power of the strong has and following asymmetric tactics to grapple with such an adversary.
The book is built around these ideas and to me, at times it appeared that the stories are being forced to fit the theme; indeed some of the tales did not appear to have much to do with the core hypotheses. A case in point is the narrative of the insurgency in Northern Ireland and law and order in some of the badlands of urban America.

The books tilts at conventional logic and comes up with a few interesting and credible arguments. One is the proposition that contrary to common understanding of parents and educationists, small classrooms are necessarily not beneficial for its students. Indeed, Gladwell argues that lack of competition and peer support to weaker children militate against the desirability of small classes. There is a great deal to be said for the desirability of interaction among children and its value to education. Also, teachers of small classes do not automatically pay more attention to each student; human nature is to adapt and work less in such circumstances. Gladwell also points out that very large classroom are not beneficial either; they are chaotic and render children nameless and anonymous. He quotes figures from the performance of either variety to underscore his conclusions. A median strength is preferable, he says. Could it be about 25 children per class in the Indian conditions?

Similarly, the book argues that joining the more ‘prestigious’ schools and colleges is not always an advantage. There is a great deal to commend the theory that to be a large fish in a small pond does much more for the growth of an individual than to be reduced to being a small fish in the large pond of an elite college. A student who joins an Ivy League college on merit might soon find that in the new environment of heightened meritocracy, he or she is just an average player. Not only can self-esteem be a casualty, many students actually drop out of their preferred courses and take up other streams of education. The elite schools do more to ‘ássure’ wealthy parents that they are providing the ‘best’ possible education to their children that they do for the children themselves. Indeed, the end result could well be quite the opposite of the intended objective.

Gladwell also professes the applicability of the inverted U-curve in many situations where something that appears to be an advantage hits the law of diminishing returns and even becomes counter-productive over time or when pressed beyond a point. He gives examples of law-enforcement vis a vis application of stringent laws (as in the ‘Three Strikes’ law first introduced by the State of California to stem the tide of crime) as one of the examples.

Finally, if you need an occasional fix of pop-sociology and want to quell that desire to understand the way slices of our world function, I would recommend David and Goliath – Underdogs, Misfits and the Art of Battling Giants.

Incidentally, this was the first book I ever ‘heard’ through the earphones as I walked every morning. The experience was enjoyable and made the walks easier. But I did find that once in a while my mind tended to wander and had to be nudged back. Initially that bothered me till I reminded myself that even when I ‘read’ a book, my concentration is rarely a hundred percent!

The Siege by Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark

Armies and security agencies the world over are in love with the phrase ‘lessons learnt’. Others too have embraced this expression whenever the need to forget our follies arises. After all, it has such a comforting ring to it, an assurance that we will not foul-up again and that while we may not have been wise in time in the past, we have pored over our errors with such sharp introspection that we need not worry about the future. And lest the less industrious have trouble digesting the syrup of our labour, we have reduced it to bullet points that lend themselves to adorning a single slide of a PowerPoint presentation.

Is this a frivolous introduction to the review of a very serious work that recounts a terror attack of most vicious kind that India – and most of the world – has ever seen? Perhaps not. Because what alarmed me most after I put down this remarkably researched book is the sickening realization that, arguably, we have done little or nothing since the attack that was called India’s 26/11, to repair the infirmities of our system.

The author duo has already been celebrated for their work ’Meadows’, an account of the kidnapping of ten Western backpackers in Kashmir by terrorists. The present work ’The Siege – The Attack on the Taj’ is another work of similar painstaking and meticulous research. Using credible sources, it reconstructs events right from the planning of the attack in Pakistan to the journey of the terrorists across the Arabian sea and the horrendous mayhem they inflicted on unarmed civilians in Taj, Cafe Leopold, the Chatrapati Shivaji Railway Terminus, the Chabad House where Jews lived and other places. The story is chilling in its rendition and every word rings of authentication.  This is a minute by minute account of the events; the mobile conversations between the terrorists and their handlers in Pakistan, the courage of a few unarmed and inadequately armed policemen, the great character shown by many including the manager of the hotel who lost his entire family and the failure of our decision making apparatus are among the many sub-plots that illuminate the narrative. A Note on the Sources in the end is most instructive.

Nearly 300 pages in length, it is an easy read. The authors mostly stick to reporting (brilliantly) and adopt a mostly non-judgmental approach that steers clear of pontificating.     

The book is highly recommended for everyone.

And the Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini

Perhaps the most remarkable achievement of Khaled Hosseini’s story telling is that most – if not all – the dramatis personae exude goodness and love. This was true of his first book, The Kite Runner and it is certainly so of the third I have read – And the Mountain Echoed.

It is a tale that spawns decades and continents. It is a weave of an amazingly constructed web – of separation and reunion, longing and fulfillment, centrifugal and centripetal pulls that cause drifts in opposite directions. Khaled Hosseini is not afraid to scoop up every human emotion and color his canvas with it. He is aiming at your heart and knows how to tug at it, gently but relentlessly.

At the very root is the love of a young brother Abdullah for his little sister Pari, both of a family living in penury in a village in Afghanistan of 1950s. The two are separated early in life and the rest of the story is a collage of many seemingly disparate lives that inhabit France and the US and Greece and Italy and, of course, Afghanistan through its roller-coaster history, and seem to bear barely tenuous six-degrees-of-separation connections. And yet, you hope against hope that somehow a miracle is lying in happy ambush to join dots invisible to the naked eye.

It is a beautiful story, told by a generously loving heart. Recommended!  

Unaccustomed earth by Jhumpa Lahiri

Reading a story by Jhumpa Lahiri’s is like watching a slow moving stream. Events move ever so slowly, even pausing and lingering in a swirl and evoking curiosity about the direction they are headed in. There are no overtly cataclysmic and watershed moments, no tipping points that explain the past and reveal the future. In other words the stories mirror life itself, mostly linear and zigzagging and uneventful but quietly shaping us all the time, gathering possibilities and potentials at every step.

The stories, all set in the backdrop of the life of Indian immigrants in the West, are about longing, aspirations, love and deep seated emotions that are rarely, if ever, allowed to leap out of our skin. They are also about death and how it posthumously defines and shape others around us.

The prose is lyrical and alert to details, perceptively diving into each character and then out to rest on every detail that might add depth to the tale. No words are wasted and yet none are denied expression. The eight stories are a pleasure to read.

Post Script: Inside the back-cover I found the portrait of Ms Lahiri. Her gorgeousness brought back the silent remark I had made to Him when I first saw Yahoo! CEO and President Marissa Mayer’s picture: “Are you not going overboard in loading it in favour of some?” I had asked.     

Manage Your Day-To-Day. Edited by Jocelyn K, Glei

All my life, I have been a sucker for books that might effect 'self-improvement'. But there is only so much of even the good stuff you can digest; so during the past few years, I had stopped acquiring this genre and begun to wonder if some of the knowledge had fermented into wisdom. The answer to that question sends me neither into throes of ecstasy, nor slough of despondency. In other words, these books have been useful to a reasonable extent.

Last week I lifted the self imposed moratorium and requested Flipkart for Manage Your Day-To-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus & Sharpen Your Creative Mind, a collection of articles edited by Jocelyn K, Glei. The title appeared tacky and appeared to signal poverty of promise, but if there is one book that can win the case for never judging a book by its cover, this is it!

The authors recognize that we are individuals and to lay down a template would be naive. Instead, we are offered great insights into what might work and are left to create our own recipe and eventually a full meal.There is an opening section on building a rock-solid routine that reinforces the point that great habits can free us from much of the self-sabotaging tyranny of a poorly thought out routine. There is another section on distractions and I found the chapters on dealing with email, social networking and surfing the net extremely relevant and useful.

It is an insightful and inspirational book. If you find the daily routine too overwhelming to allow you to be creative and to do what you would really like to, the book can get you thinking and started on an entirely different path. One that might head towards your personal goals.

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

When I picked up this book, I did not have the slightest clue about the nature or depth of Toni Morrison’s writing. During the many hours I have spent browsing in bookshops, I had seen her novels displayed prominently on the shelves. But for some reason that I cannot retrospectively fathom, I was never nudged strongly enough by my subconscious to pick one up long enough to be dazzled by what lay inside.

And completely, unalterably, irreversibly dazzled is what I am after reading The Bluest Eye! Where were you Ms Morrison, during the past five decades of my engagement with the written word? And where was I?

I

f I were to describe this profound work in simplistic phraseology, this is the story of Pecola, an impoverished and ‘extremely ugly’ African American girl who feels, deeply, that her eminently tragic existence could only be redeemed in some measure if her eyes magically acquire the color blue.

Each sentence is a gift wrapping that promises to reveal yet another surprise. The prose is brilliantly evocative, fearlessly direct and starkly honest. The entire star-cast is ‘black’ and yet among the longest shadows cast on the narrative is by the invisible presence of the ‘white’ people. It will be equally accurate to say that this is a book about ‘race’ and that it is a book not about ‘race.

None of the characters is straining to cover herself or himself with even a shred of glory, and yet we are compelled to understand the fabric of their motivations. No apology is made on anyone’s behalf either– not for Cholly Breedlove for sexually assaulting and impregnating his child, nor for his wife Pauline who fought him with matching violence and yet submitted to him, or the misanthropic Dream Reader Soaphead Church who plotted the murder of his landlady’s aging dog, or the ladies of easy virtue, delightfully named as China and Maginot Line; about the last name, I must confess that my acquaintance with military history did provoke me to wonder why a lady in flesh trade would be named after French defenses that were considered resistant to any breach?

The slim book has an extremely insightful Afterword that Toni Morrison wrote in 1993, nearly three decades after she started writing this book in days that were racially among the most surcharged in the US and 14 years after the book was first published in 1979. It gives the work an even more heightened context.  

A brilliant book!   

Lessons to Live By

A few months ago, as I traveled by train, I pondered over some of the major lessons I have ‘learnt’ during my life. I write the word ‘learnt’ with abundant caution because ‘learnt’ should have the same connotation as ‘completely imbibed and translated into practice’. 

Alas, I cannot even remotely claim such an achievement!

All the same, here are the big lessons (both sublime and ridiculous) that have struck a chord in me:

I am not my Ego.

To awaken and be aware is the only purpose of my life. Living life mindfully and in the Now is the way to do it.

Discipline – delaying gratification and accepting pain first – is the key to solving all of life’s problems.

What you do between stimulus and response becomes you.

When confronted with multiple choices of what to do, do what is good for long-term, even when it is clearly not urgent – especially when it is not urgent!

Nine-tenth of the wisdom lies in being wise in time.

Visualisation, intention and believing in what you seek is the ‘secret’ to getting.

When it comes to money, understand the difference between assets and liabilities. Anything that adds to what you have is an asset. Create assets.

The most important issue for a commander (and we are all commanders of our selves!) is having and constantly re-creating ‘reserves’ Without ‘reserves’ one is only a helpless and reactive tool to evolving circumstances. Reserves are critical to influencing the battle of life.

Not surprisingly, the above two lessons apply as much to health, use of time and relationships, as they do to ‘money’.

In contentious issues, try and visualize the ‘end-game’. Are you prepared for the eventuality? Is it worth the strife? Or is there a better way?

Often ‘acceptance’ of what is is the key to peace and happiness. Acceptance is not surrender. Acceptance is a choice and always calls for wisdom, courage and restraint.

Finish what you begin. Do not allow delays (there never will be a ‘perfect moment’ to start; indeed the business of ‘perfect moment’ is the biggest delusion there is!) and if a deviation occurs, get back on rails quickly.

Hard work – not talent – is the king.

Weight loss is almost entirely a matter of calories. Exercise has great uses for promoting health and increasing basal metabolic rate (BMR) (which assists weight loss) but eventually the dice is loaded in favour of imbibing fewer calories. Eating smaller meals frequently – and never giving your body’s intelligence the impression that you plan to go hungry and hence it needs to store all calories for future use – is part of the trick.

If you wish to write, you need to schedule it and then stick to the schedule. Waiting for inspiration is as likely to succeed as waiting on a beach for a message in a bottle.  

A plan without time-lines, resource allocation and reality check is not a plan.


To read a person solely based on his looks or words is to set yourself up for possible failure, even a trap. While looks and words count, always, always, always judge people by their actions.

Good story telling is about brevity, maintaining suspense and punch-line. It is not about stretching the tale to milk it for as long as one can. To do that is to sound death-knell for the story.

For a presenter – a teacher, a speaker, an actor, an impressionist, a comedian or a singer – the most important element is the audience.The fare should be pitched at the level of most of the audience. To ignore this and rely solely on display of one’s ‘knowledge’ or ‘brilliance’ is to fail.

‘Style and substance’ both matter in life (and in presentations) but the sequence implicit in that expression is flawed; it must always be ‘substance and style’. While you risk being underrated if you lack ‘style’, you can never ever succeed without ‘substance’. Cannot sell a bad product for long merely with good advertising!

Love is the willingness to stretch boundaries of one’s ego to accommodate another, solely for his or her long-term good.

A good movie is a credible story told well. (There! And everyone in Bollywood says there is no formula to make a 'good' film!)

The Weight of my Argument

It isn't hard to lose weight.

I don’t think anyone has ever said that seriously. But as fuzzy and convenient self-deluding assurances go, in many heads this one sits at the top of the ladder. Or why would not so many of us burn with anxiety and jolt ourselves out of gluttonous-lethargic stupor and get going? How many failures will it take for us to realize that the only diet that really works is the one that permanently tilts the ‘calories in’ and ‘calories out’ equation in the favor of the latter?

But maybe you know all of this and more but would simply like to start tomorrow. It is a delightful thought. Just the hint of putting it off for another day sweeps such a wave of false well-being through each of our cells that the strategy becomes compelling beyond challenge. Over time, it burns into our sub-conscious and every whispered vow to ‘diet’ or ‘lose weight’ awakens the demon that shoves us towards another magically perfect day.

Such bullshit we shovel to our own selves!

I will simply recount some milestones of my life to demonstrate the debilitating cost of dodging the truth that now is the only moment you can count on. And that action, not intention will save the soul.

Be the judge.

1972. As a 14 year old, I confessed to my diary that my main problem of life was my weight.  1972? 41 years ago? And I haven’t waved the white flag of defeat yet?

1974. I qualify for the National Defence Academy and am promptly rejected – temporarily – for excess weight. I return home, give up all food save enough to preserve my mortality, jog many a kilometer in the sun and reach for the medical re-examination famished for the past day and a half. I am declared fit.

1983. My photos before and after marriage reveal a nouveau corpulence of dimensions that should have triggered warnings of imminent calamity. Others ascribed it to happiness thus placing a collective seal of approval on incipient obesity.

1987. During the annual medical examination, confronted by a particularly fastidious doctor who declared every intention of downgrading my medical category on account of obesity, I got to work. I designed a 1200-calorie diet that sucked the lard – and energy – out of me. I walked and walked, and when strength permitted I even jogged. I stayed completely away from oils and sugar. I dropped some 15 kilos, won the unbending medic’s grudging seal of approval and, without delay or fuss, moved back to imbibing fried stuffed parathas and the like.

1990. A mirror-image repeat of 1987. I stuck to the stringent regimen, making no exception to touch even a grain of sugar during celebrations for the birth of our younger son, Siddharth. I lost the 15 or so kilos I had assiduously accumulated. And after Mission Accomplished I reverted to Operation Undo Health with renewed resolve.

2000. I remained overweight through the decade, scaling higher numbers of varying impressiveness. But by 2000 I had completely outdone myself, resolutely staying above 100 kilos and often threatening to cross the 110 landmark. During a visit to Indian Space Research Organisation, on a special weighing scale I checked out how much I might weigh on different planets. I found that I was unfit and obese on all, barring for service on the moon.

2001. My father was operated upon after a cardiac attack. Pacing up and down in a corridor of the hospital I shook a fist at myself and vowed to wake up. After all, he had been in a far better shape than I was and was an inveterate teetotaler. If this did not change my orientation towards health, I asked, what would?

2003. Two more years passed while I waited for that perfect moment. Finally, fed up and cross with myself, I embraced the dangerous Dr Atkins’ Diet. I reinforced the caloric loss with a regular 5 km run, often plodding through the overnight snow. I lost 27 kilos in five months, prompting universal and inebriating adulation. Donning this newly emerged persona, I landed up in Hawaii on a 3-month Study Program. And promptly began to run the short route back to obesity.

2013. In the past decade, I have made many starts, only to flounder in days. A million Excel sheets have been drawn up, charts inserted, formulas set in place only to be deleted and banished even from the Recycle bin even before the downward worm had settled down.

13 August 2013. I am still over 100 kilos and still nursing the dream to scale down to 70!  And now I have begun again on a carefully crafted life-style that will ensure healthy eating, regular feed, controlled calories, dollops of exercise and adequate sleep. I am on my way, this time determinedly on a one-way ticket.

Follow my progress here. I will share menus, tips and numbers.

But, more crucially, if you too intend fighting the Battle of the Bulge, read the above story of my sporadic assaults carefully and know that Mr Bond was right – tomorrow never comes.

This is the weight of my argument.

This Morning

In the calm of early morning, along the path of my walk, is a hem of trees and undergrowth; solid green stillness lying in ambush. 

Not a leaf fluttered in defiance of this discipline, not a branch swayed inadvertently. 

The wind appeared to have been quarantined elsewhere, so the eye could absorb the offering un-distracted by movement. 

Or was I sleepwalking through a giant painting?

The Story Hereafter

I am 55.

This is quite a foundation, built of stones and bricks of a million sizes and every hue on display. It looks formidable but it isn't even of seamless texture, leave alone uniform strength. Indeed many parts of it are flawed and, while setting the next stone, I must ignore them for the sake of the longevity of the edifice that will follow.

Looked at individually, each stone is a fascination of indescribable wonder: look closely and you would spot many variations of the themes of success, failure, serendipity, grace, anxieties, fears, love, rage, drift, empathy, apathy, inebriation, solidity, flexibility, sobriety, affection, patriotism, cowardice, and you will have identified but a microcosm, a tiny bit visible easily to the naked eye.

No matter what the station of our lives, we still have an edifice to build. And as we engage in it, with or without the tools of mindfulness, we draw on what has gone before.

I have done my share of sleepwalking. I have perennially deluded myself that there is a perfect moment to begin living mindfully and that that moment arrives at a well-defined hour or date that has one distinguishing feature – it isn't now. I have ignored the passage of time and fuzzily pretended that it wasn't passing or could be bent at any moment and even recalled at will. I read the signposting that confirmed the directions I already knew and I often ignored the ones that warned me of errors, even grievous ones. In celebration of my ‘heroic youth’ I often wore lack of mindfulness as body armour, proofing myself against assault by reason and awareness. And I survived because grace cuts us huge slack.

Oh, don’t get me wrong; plenty of good too has been my tailwind. Like everyone else, I too have benefited from millions of brief shining moments that, stitched together, make me who I am. Yes, in balance I am in the black.

This blog is a very personal story of the structure that will rise; of that elusive mirage called future that, upon arrival after some trudge, always appears, like a passing ship, and as a place called now; of my life that will follow.

A life that must be crafted, brick by brick.

Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I admire Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. I consider Purple Hibiscus a great book and Half of a Yellow Sun not too far behind. The Purple Hibiscus revealed what a great story teller she is - observant and empathetic with a felicity for lyrical prose. I took up Americanah with the eagerness of a child revisiting a favorite place and discarded my critical shield.

Do you already suspect what is coming next?

Disappointment might be too strong a word, but, to say the least, I was not bowled over. Americanah, a 480-page tome, is about 'race', particularly about its 'controversial' ism in America. It is more of an informal essay that relies on a flood of anecdotal props, stitched together to outline a story and thus couched as a work of fiction.

The story is largely seen through the eyes of a Nigerian woman - with a charming name Ifemelu - who travels from Nigeria to the US and, after a stay that ends in many loves, daily brushes with 'race', a blog and the acquisition of a Green Card, back to her native country. In the meanwhile, lest we not get the full picture, her first love Obinze also makes a sojourn to London before being deported for being an illegal immigrant.

The story line is thin and the entire purpose of the book is to squeeze every possible shade of racial differences as possible. The narrative does its best to paint a balanced picture - it is not merely a whites versus blacks story, but a sweeping account of the innate differences among people of different ethnic moorings. And it is built around the story of loss of love.

To be sure the book is an achievement in observation and retelling. It held my interest, if only because I felt that something more might be revealed. In the end though I found it mildly satisfying, it was a meal that held more promise than the cook could actually deliver.