The unexpected origin of ragi

KT Achaya writes in The Story of Our Food:

The great Russian botanist, Vavilow, about seventy years ago, identified what he called "centers of plant origin" in which the "evolution of plants was directed by the will of man." There were nearly a dozen of these centers all over the world where plants gradually took their place as foods for human beings. Of particular interest to India was the so-called Fertile Crescent of the Middle East, stretching from Israel to Iraq, which was an early center of agriculture and of plant evolution.

What actually happened was this. Man would pick promising weeds growing wild which carried grains. By choosing plants with abundant or plump grains, a process called selection, the quality of the grains and the yield of the plant in the next crop were both improved. Sometimes, nature itself would take a hand in the process; a wild weed would cross by chance with a cultivated species to produce offspring of a quality superior to both.

Achaya then goes on to describe how ragi, ubiquitous in India for millennia, has an unexpected connection to a different part of the world:

Botanically, ragi is Eleusine coracana. It was born in Uganda in East Africa. How do we know this? For several botanical reasons, such as the existence of its wild ancestors, the long mention of the grain in tradition, and the fact that ragi figures in old religious ceremonies in those areas. Ragi is a tetraploid, and so is the African wild plant called E. africana, which gave rise to it. But the Indian wild plant, which is called E. indica, is a diploid which does not cross with ragi at all. Now what does this mean? Only this, that the Indian wild weed could not have given rise to the ragi plant in India. This plant must, therefore, have come to India from East Africa some time in the past. When did this happen? Ragi has been found in an Indian excavation which is dated at 1800 BC, and at several other archaeological sites in central India of a slightly later date. We must therefore infer that some unknown benefactor brought this foodgrain from Africa to India in about 2000 BC. It also seems possible that two other food-grains, jowar and bajra, also came at the same time to India, from the same area in East Africa, where they were originally evolved. You see, therefore, how no country ever stands really alone; certainly our food has come to us from unexpected places.

Quotes from the The Black Swan

I finished Nassim Nicholas Taleb's The Black Swan a month ago, and still can't (and do not want to) shake off its influence on my thinking. Here are some quotes from the book:

“What we call ‘talent’ generally comes from success, rather than the opposite.”

“Death is often a good career move for an author.”

“Complicated equations do not tend to happily cohabit with clarity of mind.”

“History is opaque. You see what comes out, not the script that produces events, the generator of history.”

“In the end we are being driven by history all the while thinking that we are doing the driving.”

“Uncertainty is our [Taleb’s] discipline, and that understanding how to act under conditions of incomplete information is the highest and most urgent human pursuit.”

“Perception of causation has a significant biological foundation.”

“We pull memories along causative lines revising them involuntarily and unconsciously.”

“The same condition [impulse] that makes us simplify pushes us to think the world is less random than it actually is.”

“Both the artistic and scientific enterprises are the product of our need to reduce dimensions and inflict some [illusory] order on things.”

“We tend to use knowledge as therapy.”

“Respect for elders in many societies might be a kind of compensation for our short term memory.”

“It is tough to deal with social consequences of the appearance of continuous failure.”

“It is my great hope one day to see science and decision makers rediscover what the ancients have always known, namely that our highest currency is respect.”

“A life saved is a statistic; a person hurt is an anecdote. Statistics are invisible; anecdotes are salient.”

“Gambling is sterilized and domesticated uncertainty.”

“Probability is a liberal art…” [one of the best quotes in the book!]

“One needs to exit doubt to produce science…” [a jab at science, especially scientific theories that dumb down skepticism]

“For many people knowledge has the remarkable power of producing confidence rather than measurable aptitude.”

“That strange activity called the business meeting, in which well fed but sedentary men involuntarily restrict their blood circulation with an expensive device called the necktie.”

“If you hear a prominent economist use the word equilibrium or normal distribution put a rat down his shirt.”

“Capitalism is, among other things, the revitalization of the world, thanks to the opportunity [for some people] to be lucky.”

“We tend to be against religious theories but not economic theories.”

“Luck is far more egalitarian than even intelligence.”

Conquerors, but also cultural carriers

In the marvelous introduction to his book, Genghis khan And The Making Of The Modern World, Jack Weatherford writes,

The Mongols made no technological breakthroughs, founded no new religions, wrote few books or dramas, and gave the world no new crops or methods of agriculture. Their own craftsmen could not weave cloth, cast metal, make pottery or even bake bread. They manufactured neither porcelain nor pottery, painted no pictures, and built no buildings. Yet, as their army conquered culture after culture, they collected and passed all of these skills from one civilization to next.

The Mongols deliberately opened the world to new commerce not only in goods, but also in ideas and knowledge. The Mongols brought German miners to China and Chinese doctors to Persia. The transfers ranged from the monumental to the trivial. They spread the use of carpets everywhere they went and transplanted lemons and carrots from Persia to China, as well as noodles, playing cards, and tea from China to the West. They brought a metal worker from Paris to build a fountain on the dry steppes of Mongolia, recruited an English nobleman to serve as interpreter in their army, and took the practice of Chinese fingerprinting to Persia. They financed the building of Christian churches in China, Buddhist temples and stupas in Persia, and Muslim Koranic schools in Russia. The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors, but also as civilization´s greatest cultural carriers.

The Mongols who inherited Genghis Khan´s empire exercised a determiend drive to move products and commodities around and to combine them in ways that produced entirely novel products and unprecedented invention. When their highly skilled engineers from
China, Persia and Europe combined Chinese gunpowder with Muslim flamethrowers and applied European bell casting technology, they produced the canon, an entirely new order of technological innovation, from which sprang the vast modern arsenal of weapons from pistols to missiles. While each item had some significance the larger imnpact came from in the way the Mongols selected and combined technologies to create unusual hybrids.

Seemingly every aspect of European life -- technology, warfare, clothing, commerce, food, art,liteature and music -- changed during the Renaissance as a result of the Mongol influence. In addition to new forms of fighting, new machines and new foods, even the most mundane aspects of daily life changed as the Europeans switched to Mongol fabrics, wearing pants and jackets instead of tunics and robes, played their musical instruments with the steppe bow rather than plucking them with the fingers, and painted their pictures in a new style. The Europeans even picked up the Mogol exclamation hurray as an enthusiastic cry of bravado and mutual encouragement.

Some links

Sadanand Dhume writes about Islam in Indonesia; Chandrahas Choudhury on the importance of translations in Indian literature. And Sidin Vadakut, who graduated a year after I did from REC-Trichy, now has his first novel out -- it's called Dork: The Incredible Adventures of Robin "Einstein" Verghese. An extract can be found here -- it's hilarious. Sidin himself summarizes: "My book is, as it were, a pure crystallized expression of the post-modern dialectic that envelops us all in the modern workplace. It is a startling, unsettling piece of fiction that cuts perilously close to the existential reality that is us. By which I mean you and me. All of us. Firmament."

Realism -- lifeness

The last paragraph of How Fiction Works -- one of my all time favorites now -- by the brilliant literary critic, James Wood:

Realism, seen broadly as truthfulness to the way things are, cannot be mere verisimilitude, cannot be mere lifelikeness, or lifesameness, but what I must call lifeness: life on the page, life brought to a different life by the highest artistry. And it cannot be a genre; instead, it makes other forms of fiction seem like genres. For realism of this kind –lifeness – is the origin. It teaches everything else; it schools its own truants: it is what allows magical realism, hysterical realism, fantasy, science fiction, even thrillers, to exist. It is nothing like as naïve as its opponents charge; almost all the great twentieth century realist novels also reflect on their own making, and are full of artifice. All the greatest realists, from Austen to Alice Munro, are at the same time great formalists. But this will be unceasingly difficult: for the writer has to act as if the available novelistic methods are continually about to turn into mere convention and so has to try to outwit that inevitable aging. Chekov’s challenge – “Ibsen doesn’t know life. In life it simply isn’t like that” – is as radical now as it was a century ago, because forms must continually be broken. The true writer, that free servant of life, is one who must always be acting as if life were a category beyond anything the novel had yet grasped; as if life itself were always on the verge of becoming conventional.

There’s some synergy between this and what Naipaul has to say on the writer’s biggest challenge: finding the most original form to express his experience.

Best best books 2009

Savor Chandrahas Choudhury´s best non-fiction and fiction books of the year. This is from a man who lives and breathes books -- and earns a living that way too. Note especially the lesser known entries in the list --for example the Tamil writer Salma´s The Hour Past Midnight, which I will definitely be reading. My own very short list-- many books in it inspired by Chandrahas´ selection from last year -- is here.

My favorite books this year

It's that time of the year -- everyone comes up with lists. I generally don't do this, but given that the end of the semester has pretty much taken over my schedule, a post like this is a lot easier than a long essay or a review. So here are my ten for the year, in no particular order:

1. Curfewed Night -- Basharat Peer
2. Butter Chicken in Ludhiana -- Pankaj Mishra (which prompts the question: why does Mishra write such boring stuff these days?)
3. Cut-outs, Caste and Cine Stars -- Vaasanthi
4. Arzee the Dwarf -- Chandrahas Choudhury
5. Descent into Chaos -- Ahmed Rashid
6. The Metamorphosis -- Franz Kafka
7. Contested Lands -- Sumantra Bose
8. Red Sun -- Sudeep Chakravarti
9. How Fiction Works -- James Wood
10. The Ayatollah Begs to Differ -- Hooman Majd (even though I haven't finished it yet)

Some other books that caught my attention:

1. Essentials of Indian Philosophy -- M. Hiriyana
2. A Critical Survey of Indian Philosophy -- Chandradhar Sharma
3. The Columbian Exchange -- Alfred Crosby
4. The Mexico Reader: History, Politics, Culture
5. The Peru Reader: History, Politics, Culture
6. Samskara -- UR Anantha Murthy
7. The Story of Our Food -- KT Acharya

Maoist movements in India -- Sudeep Chakravarti's Red Sun

Sudeep Chakravarti is the author of the very revealing and disturbing Red Sun, a travelogue through the states in India affected by left wing extremism (Maoism, also interchangeably referred to as Naxalism). Rohit Chopra has an excellent interview with the author. Here's Chakravarti's long, thoughtful answer to Chopra's question:

What made you write this book? Why did you feel this story had to be told?

I have spent my career as a journalist, both as reporter and editor, tracking India’s economic development, meeting those on the “street”, as well as top ministers, entrepreneurs, and executives from India and abroad; and attending summits from Delhi to Davos. I am a direct beneficiary of India’s ongoing economic liberalization and freedom of expression that India’s urban middle classes have come to take for granted. But there is an issue I did not wish to keep quiet about. Except for perhaps a ‘unity’ based on the rupee, corruption, cinema, and cricket, there is a grave disconnect between urban and rural India and even within urban India. This disconnect is economic, social, and political. Seventy percent of India is away from the ‘growth party’. To imagine that India can be unstoppable with its gross poverty and numbing caste issues is to be in lunatic denial, a display of unstoppable ego.

Red Sun: Travels in Naxalite Country was a story waiting to be told. There is a fairly large and excellent body of non-fiction writing on the Naxal movement of the 1960s and early 1970s and on various subsequent extreme-Left incarnations through the 1980s, in several Indian languages and in English. But besides the occasional media coverage around the time of major skirmishing between rebels and security forces, there isn’t a book on the movements of today as driven by the Communist Party of India (Maoist) that attempts to demystify the Naxal movement.

The second reason for the book was that there is a great lack of telling the human story about and around the present play of Left-wing rebellion. Typically, one comes by statistics and glib sound bites. The dispossessed and the dead are not numbers; they were–and are–people. With Red Sun I have attempted to humanize a very tragic conflict, of a country at war with itself.

A third reason is that learned writing about Maoism in India (which continues to be interchangeably referred to as Naxalism) is generally restricted to academic journals and analyses by think-tanks. There is a crying need to mainstream it, tell the lay reader, as it were, about what is going on, shake ‘middle India’ out of its mall-stupor and diminish the delusions of grandeur of India’s lawmakers.

There was every reason to write Red Sun. The truth about this wrenching war has to be told.

A devastating denial of civilized instincts

Reading this essay on Torture and the War on Terror, a new book by Tzvetan Todorov, I was reminded of a passionately argued chapter on the same topic by Ahmed Rashid in Descent Into Chaos. This is how it begins:

If war has been mankind’s most powerful negative urge, then the universal agreements that limit the horrors of war and protect civilians have been the hallmark of progress and have reflected man’s deeper instincts for civilization. The Geneva Convention may not have halted the Jewish holocaust, Rwandan genocide, or terrorism but they have given us a code of conduct by which we can judge the actions of our leaders in the desperate times of war. That is why the decision by President Bush on February 7, 2002, to deny captured al Qaeda, Taliban and other terrorist suspects prisoner of war (POW) status or any access to justice was a step backward for the United States and for mankind – one that has haunted the United States, its allies and the international legal system ever since. Whereas in the West it created a furious debate about civil liberties, in the Muslim World it further entrenched dictatorship and abuse of civilians.

For the greatest power on earth to wage its “war on terrorism” by rejecting the very rules of war it is a signatory to, denying justice at home, undermining the U.S. Constitution, and then pressurizing its allies to do the same set in motion a devastating denial of civilized instincts. America's example had the most impact in Afghanistan, where no legal system existed; in Pakistan, ruled by a military regime; and in Central Asia, where the world's most repressive dictatorships flourished. By following America's lead in promoting or condoning disappearances, torture, and secret jails, these countries found their path to democracy and their struggle against Islamic extremism set back by decades. Western-led nation building had little credibility if it denied justice to the very people it was supposed to help. It could well be argued that over time Islamic extremists were emboldened rather than subdued by the travesty of justice the United States perpetrated. The people learned to hate America.

The name of the chapter is, aptly, America Shows the Way.

Syādvāda: The Jain concept of relativity of knowledge

Chandradhar Sharma writes in A Critical Survey of Indian Philosophy about a central concept in Jainism, Syādvāda:

Syādvāda is the theory of Relativity of knowledge. Reality has infinite aspects which are all relative and we can know only some of these aspects. All our judgments, therefore, are necessarily relative, conditional and limited.

The Jainas are fond of quoting the old story of the six blind men and the elephant. The blind men put their hands on the different parts of the elephant and each tried to describe the whole animal from the part touched by him. Thus the man who caught the ear said the elephant was like a country-made fan; the person touching the led said the elephant was like a pillar; the holder of the trunk said it was like a python; the feeler of the tail said it was like a rope; the person who touched it on the side said the animal was like a wall; and man who touched the forehead said the elephant was like the breast. And all the six quarreled among themselves, each one asserting that his description alone was correct. But he who can see the whole elephant can easily know that each blind man feels only a part of the elephant which he mistakes to be the whole animal. Almost all philosophical, ideological and religious differences and disputes are mainly due to mistaking a partial truth for the whole truth. Our judgments represent different aspects of the manysided reality and can claim only partial truth. This view makes Jainism catholic, broad-minded and tolerant. It teaches respect for others’ point of view.

*
Why, you may wonder, this noticeable increase in posts to do with religion? Because I have never understood religion in any substantive way. The time has now come to fill that gap. And what better place to begin than with ancient Indian schools of thought. I grew up in the Hindu tradition but never was I told that there was more to practicing religion than rituals and boring visits to temples. I knew about Shankaracharya, but it was only last month that I learned that there is such a thing as Advaita Vedanta, which he preached; I was told Hinduism was polytheistic but only now am I beginning to learn that it is polytheistic only in manifestation, and that the Upanishads actually suggest the unity of all life, of everything in fact.

But let me not get carried away with details: all I wanted to say was that I need to catch up with reading of a different kind, and that there will be more posts to come on similar themes.

The MGR phenomenon

I am referring to MG Ramachandran (1917-1987), one of the most important figures of Tamil politics, who, with help from other prominent leaders of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), including the crafty script-writer Karunanidhi, seamlessly moved between cinema and politics as if the two were one. In the process they created a politics that had all the drama of movies and movies that were overtly political. Later MGR broke with Karunanidhi, formed his own party, the AIADMK (All India Anna DMK), and used his power as a star to cast a kind of spell on Tamil Nadu. I would like to give you a flavor of the MGR phenomenon using excerpts from Vaasanthi’s Cut-outs, Caste and Cine Stars, which I wrote about briefly here.

1. Cinema with a pint of blood

Blood donations in Tamil Nadu and MGR movie premieres were strangely connected -- this is the sort of anecdote that just about proves that reality can be more bizarre than the wildest fiction:

It looked as if every young man in town was eager to donate blood. The hospitals noted a record number of donors. Young Sadanand Menon, who was just out of college and joined the Indian Express, as a reporter, was intrigued. And also deeply touched. The editor had asked him to look into the new phenomenon. It was strange indeed. But Sadanand found out that the crowd of donors peaked on Thursdays, declined on the following days and rose again from Wednesday. The donors were paid five rupees per pint of blood. The blood was sold to buy cinema tickets for the new releases on Fridays. He confirmed that whenever a new MGR movie was released, the queue for blood donation was the longest on the previous day.

2. Sipped juice is holy water

India Today -- as quoted in Vaasanthi's book -- on MGR:

For close to a decade, the matinee-idol-turned politician had monopolized the floodlights as only a man who has straddled Tamil Nadu's intertwined worlds of cinema and politics can. As a hero of scores of films, his name was a household word for more than twenty years. And his well-known acts of personal charity -- distributing food and clothes to the poor -- had earned him a special affection bordering on worship. If he merely sipped a glass of orange juice offered to him at a public meeting, the rest of the liquid would be diluted in buckets of water, which would then be passed around for his fans to drink as theertham -- holy water. Slumlords in the industrial town of Coimbatore used to pull down giant film hoardings of MGR and hire them out to slum women to sleep on at night.

3. Cultivating an image

The importance of image was not lost on MGR. These are his own words:

It is not enough if you are good man, you must create an image that you are a good man. Every man must have an image. Take Nagi Reddy or S.S. Vasan or myself. Each of us have a distinct image. The image is what immediately strikes you when you see a person or hear his name. You put forward an image of yourself if you want to get anywhere.

Vaasanthi writes:

MGR’s entire career can be termed as a synthesis between acting and politics. His fans and supporters were so carried away by the image that they could see no difference between the screen characters and the real person...it was believed that he would agree only to play roles that corresponded to his personal values and commitments.

4. MGR and women

Narendra Srinivasan makes an interesting observation in his book Ethnicity and Popular Mobilization. ‘Women were sensitive to the basic issues MGR raised – the availability of food and water, as they are homemakers; and temperance, as excessive male drinking bled their family budgets and often led to violence against them.’ Rural women desired protection against a culture that was associated with alcohol, violence and the perception of women as whores. MGR gave them status and a sense of dignity by calling them ‘thaikulam’, community of mothers.

And women loved MGR, no matter what he called them. With the advent of cinema halls, there was a newfound freedom they enjoyed within the darkened walls with just their hero on the screen. They could consort with the beloved hero in their imagination, identifying with MGR’s various heroines. ‘The intensity of this identification,’ Subramanian says, ‘meant that support was readily transferred after MGR’s death to Jayalalithaa, who was one of MGR’s popular screen heroines through the 1960s and the early 1970s.

Interestingly enough, Rajnikant, the other cine star Tamilnadu is crazy about, is not so popular with women. Vaasanthi reasons that this is because of "Rajni's anti-hero image -- the irreverent, smoking, drinking, woman-bashing hero -- appealed only to the diaffected male in search of an identity, and definitely not a female audience."

5. The poor, Sri-Lankan born Malayali

And finally here’s a very short biography of MGR that may help complete the picture. I present this deliberately at the end, rather than give an up-front introduction – that’s because sometimes you get fascinated with a person’s deeds and then want the details: “Who was this guy?” “What was his background?” In short, MGR was Malayali and was born in Sri Lanka into a very poor family. But here's more:

Marudur Gopalmenon Ramachandran was born on 17 January 1917, in Kandy, Sri Lanka. MGR’s father, Gopala Menon, died when was still a child and left the family penniless. Ramachandran’s mother Sathya moved to India with her children and settled in Kumbakonam, Tamilnadu. Hunger claimed the lives of two of his sisters and an elder brother. Driven by extreme poverty, MGR began his acting career as a theatre artist at the age of seven, and joined the Madurai Original Boys Company, owned by M. Kandasamy Pillai. Ramachandran was fair-complexioned and pretty as a girl, and it was said that it was common for the wealthy, land-owning young men of Thanjavur district to sexually abuse such kids. This, according to a chronicler, may have affected MGR’s psyche. After a long struggle M.G. Ramachander, as he was then called, got a break doing small roles in mythological films followed by action films that became his forte. Critics never thought much of his limited talent as an actor though his films broke records at the box office. He also won the National Award for acting in Rickshawkaran.

Vaasanthi on the world of Tamil politics

I have just read the introduction of Tamil journalist and writer Vaasanthi’s book Cut-outs, Caste and Cine Stars: The World of Tamil Politics, and I already know I am going to enjoy reading the book, that it is going to tell me things about my home state that I am completely unaware of. After my travel last week through cities in Tamilnadu’s interior, I am eager for analysis that can provide perspective. Vaasanthi's is just the right book. Here she is, telling us why politics in Tamilnadu is so regional:

The most striking difference has been the regionalization of party politics in Tamil Nadu when compared with other states. While ethnic forces were gaining ground in other parts of India as well, it was in Tamil Nadu that they dominated party politics. It is this that has, till today, prevented the growth of parties with an all-India face in the state. By transforming Tamil language into a object of passionate attachment, by introducing notions of self-respect and regional pride and by providing their version of Tamil cultural history, the DMK spokespersons came out as better Tamil nationalists than the Congress, for instance. The party created what has been described as a ‘hegemonic hold over Tamil political life and culture’. The Congress has long since been marginalized in the state for this reason.

The Tamils cannot relate to the BJP’s Hindutva either for the same reason. The increasing religiosity in evidence now in Tamilnadu should not be attributed to the spread of the BJP. The BJP with its North Indian, Hindi-speaking, Hindu-fundamentalist veneer has made little dent on the Tamil psyche. The pronounced religiosity that is strikingly visible in Tamil Nadu is another contradiction that might baffle an outsider who has heard about the Dravidian movement and its atheist protagonist, Periyar. Ironically, the growing religiosity is the direct result of the shift in the caste hierarchies thanks to the Self-Respect Movement and the reservation benefits and the resultant upward social mobility, which has brought about a silent and willing ‘Brahminization’ of the backward communities who tend to project their caste status through their religiosity.

During my trip, I witnessed this “pronounced religiosity” that Vaasanthi mentions – and it was news to me that it wasn’t there, say, twenty or thirty years ago. But the last sentence in the quote explains a lot: it is precisely the sort of insight I am looking for.

The ironies, misnomers and reverberations of history

I am looking forward to reading Empires of the Indus. Alice Albinia, the author, tells us the story of the Indus River by revealing the layers of history associated with it. She does this by embarking on a journey along the river, upstream (pictures from her journey here). The Indus, of course, gave India its name, though the river itself is in Pakistan -- and its origins in Tibet. Most Indians know very little about it. I had subconsciously relegated it to antiquity along with the Indus Valley civilization when a Pakistani friend assured me the Indus still exists.

Here is Albinia from the preface of the book:

The very name India comes from the river. The ancient Sanskrit speakers called the Indus, ‘Sindhu’; the Persians changed the name to ‘Hindu’; and the Greeks dropped the ‘h’ altogether. Chinese whispers created the Indus and its cognates – India, Hindu, Indies. From the time that Alexander the Great’s historians wrote about the Indus valley, spinning exotic tales of indomitable Indika, India and its river tantalized the Western imagination.

Hundreds of years later, when India was divided, it might have been logical for the new Muslim state in the Indus valley to take the name ‘India’ (or ‘Industan’, as the valley was called by an eighteenth-century English sailor). But Muhammad Ali Jinnah rejected the colonial appellation and chose the pious neologism Pakistan, ‘Land of the Pure’, instead. He assumed his coevals in Delhi would do the same, calling their country by the ancient Sanskrit title, ‘Bharat’. When they did not, Jinnah was reported to be furious. He felt that by continuing to use the British name, India had appropriated the past; Pakistan, by contrast, looked as if it had been sliced off and ‘thrown out’.

Such are, as Albinia says, “the ironies, misnomers and reverberations of history". What an apt phrase.

Where the real apartheid was

Richard Dowden’s Africa: Altered States, Ordinary Miracles was one of the best books I read last year. Dowden has worked in Africa as a journalist for decades, and that experience shows in the book. I’ve already posted on the Somalia chapter, and also meant to post on other countries but got caught up with distractions. Now, however, the book is on my desk again, and looking at the marked sections, it’s clear that there are at least three of four interesting bits I’d like to convey – each bit in a separate post.

Let me begin with South Africa and the apartheid system that existed there. This is what Richard Dowden (who, by the way, is a British), experienced while traveling in that country in 1979:

At the coach station in the center of Johannesburg I got off and went to find a lavatory. It was round at the back and stank as if it had not been cleaned for months. As I came out a black man walked in. He looked startled – or was it fear? He said something angrily but I didn’t understand. Then I looked back and saw a pale patch on the wall where a notice had been taken down. This was a lavatory for blacks only. It was not the first occasion that I encountered black resentment at a white crossing the apartheid frontier.

The South African government at the time was taking some cosmetic steps that would make the country look less of an apartheid state. What kind of impact did they have? Dowden writes:

Whites and blacks had completely different experiences of what apartheid actually was. In white areas, where only a handful of the black population ever went, apartheid meant the signs saying Whites Only or Non-Whites Only. In black areas like Soweto, however, there were no Non-Whites or Whites Only signs. So while for whites for those signs were the most visible manifestation of apartheid, most blacks never even saw them. The removal of the signs – welcomed by the liberals – did not affect blacks at all.

This is a key insight, something that may not have occurred to the casual observer. The real apartheid and its debilitating effects were to be seen in black townships, places whites never visited:

Whites never went to see Soweto or Winterfeld or New Brighton. They had no conception of what life was like in these officially created slums. These places were what blacks experienced as apartheid. Systematically dispossessed of land, homes and the opportunity to work, to have a family and a future, they were a slave class whose sole purpose was to provide cheap labor for whites. Above all, apartheid stripped them of their rights as citizens and their dignity as human beings.

Let's kindle reading passions

How? With this product that will allow both the structured reading of books and unsystematic browsing. I am sold.

Quick thoughts and quotes on Sanskrit

I learned Sanskrit for five years, in middle and high school. And yet, at the end of those five years, I had nothing to show for my efforts. All the rote learning and exhausting analyses of sandhis had come to nothing. I couldn’t speak the language except for a few rudimentary, stilted sentences. Others in the class were the same way.

Over the years, I’ve lost touch with Sanskrit, and only recently have I begun to learn of its history and merits – often by Western scholars of the language. The Clay Sanskrit Library (New York University Press) for instance, is a monumental undertaking: many ancient Sanskrit texts, secular and religious, poetry and prose, are being translated; the library has already released several titles. I am currently trying to read Dandin’s Daskumaracarita (I really don’t know how to add the proper accents to the title, but the English translation, by Isabelle Onians, is called What Ten Young Men Did.)

One of the best and most evocative descriptions of Sanskrit I’ve read, though, is in linguist Nicolas Ostler’s Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World. Ostler surveys the world’s greatest languages: if you ever wanted a scholarly yet readable history of languages, this is it. But it is clear he has lavished the most attention upon the 75-page chapter, Charming like a Creeper: The Cultured Career of Sanskrit. This is not surprising: Ostler has a PhD in linguistics and Sanskrit from MIT.

It was in Charming like a Creeper that I first learned how complex the grammar of Sanskrit – which I had much difficulty learning in school – is and how it had been relentlessly analyzed by Indian scholars such as Panini before and in the first millennium AD. As Ostler writes, “the Sanskrit word for grammar, vyakarana, instead of being based, like the Greek grammatike, on some word for word or writing, just means analysis: so language is the subject for analysis par excellence.”

The rules of grammar in Sanskrit as expounded by Panini in his treatise Ashtadhyayi are as rigorous as the transactional format of the Turing machine. This is an amazing connection: between millennia-old ideas of grammar and modern computing. I admit I am still trying to understand what this exactly means; perhaps in a few years I can write about it with more authority. But for now, here is an extract from Ostler’s book:

“…the grammar that the tradition had defined was a vast system of abstract rules, made up of a set of pithy maxims (called sutras, literally threads) written in an artificial jargon. These sutras are like nothing so much as the rules in a computational grammar of a modern language, such as might be used in a machine translation system; without any mystical or ritual element, they apply according to abstract formal principles.”

Ostler also talks about how Sanskrit spread to the far corners of Asia, traveling along with its principal disseminators, Buddhism and Hinduism. Unlike the languages that accompanied monotheisms of the Middle East – Arabic or European languages such as Spanish – the spread of Sanskrit was entirely devoid of conquest. The south-east Asian kingdoms and even places as far away as Japan, took up elements of Sanskrit probably because it was a matter of prestige, arriving with either Hinduism or Buddhism. Evidently, India had a reputation at the time as a place where great ideas and philosophies emanated from.

The case of Japan is particularly interesting. Ostler proposes that

“Japan owes the order of its symbols in its syllabary, the so-called kana, or go-ju-on, ‘fifty sounds’, to the order of letters in Indian alphabets.”

[…]

“This thoroughgoing intellectual borrowing at the root of the writing system demonstrates that not just the sound of the Buddhist chants but also elements of traditional analysis of language had spread to Japan with Sanskrit.”

Thus, Sanskrit, traveling with the Indian subcontinent's spiritual exports, influenced the far-flung parts of Asia not only with regard to religious ideas, but also subtler aspects, such as the structure of languages. Japan was not the only case: Tibet, Cambodia, and Thailand were influenced too in this fashion. In fact, these cultures may have become literate only with the coming of Sanskrit and its associated vernaculars, such as Pali.
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And finally, a quote from an interview of Ostler, in which he summarizes why he loves Sanskrit so:

Q: Your affection for Sanskrit comes through in your book. What is it about Sanskrit that appeals to you?

A: Well, the Indian background helps: my parents would never have met if they had not both been sent out to India owing to the Second World War. But Sanskrit has many virtues that attract. Its grammar has been rigorously analyzed, but not in a doctrinaire way – there is room for intellectual debate. The classical Indian culture in which Sanskrit first flourished offers an immense variety of material, from romantic comedy and sensual poetry to epic, massive-word play, political science and philosophy. It embodies a contradiction, that a language whose literature is so lithe, should be indigenously analyzed as a sort of architectural structure. And I suppose I like the fact that it is so difficult (coming from English, certainly), yet so familiar in another way (coming at it from Latin, Greek and Russian).

New York Times: Best 10 books of the year

It's that time of the year. Everyone has their own list of best books, and the New York Times has put up what it thinks is best. Toni Morrison's A Mercy is there, so is Joseph O Neill's Netherland, and Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth; in non-fiction, Patrick French's comprehensive biography of VS Naipaul, The World is What it is.

On reading this year

A rambling post about some books I've read and come across this year.

It’s frustrating to not settle on a good book. But it’s also a pleasure to read in an unsystematic way. I try whatever interests me, and move on if the book does not get my attention. In the process, I get to read a lot of little bits and pieces, a couple of chapters here and there. This goes on until I find something that reads easily and gives great insight. I gravitate towards non-fiction these days. I am steadily losing faith in fiction, though every now and then there comes a novel that startles.

I’ve finished some hefty books this year: The Brothers Karamazov was a miraculous book, not only full of speculation about religion, philosophy and the Russian 19th century social context, but also one of the best murder mysteries I’ve read. And there is humor almost throughout the book – it erupts at unexpected moments. Dostoevsky is a bleak prospect to most readers; his name portends gloom and tragedy. But there’s a lot more to his writing.

And I finished too The Fate of Africa, another hefty book, and which I’d been tarrying for a while. Among novels, Willa Cather’s O Pioneers, Alaa Al Aswany’s The Yacoubian Building, and Louise Erdrich’s The Plague of Doves caught my attention. There’s a growing trend of popular economics writing – economics explained in accessible fashion, with everyday examples. Freakonomics and The Undercover Economist were two of this kind I liked. And it won’t be long before I read Malcolm Gladwell's Tipping Point and Blink.

But my favorite non-fiction read this year is a book about chance and probability. Leonard’s Mlodinow’s The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Affects Our Lives was a revelation. Discussing the role of chance is like discussing the supernatural, discussing God. Certainly, the book felt that way: like a scientific approach to understanding destiny, success and anomalies. When someone becomes successful, we tend to attribute special qualities after he/she has made a mark. In retrospect, everything seems obvious. We look back and say he/she succeeded because he/she had something special. But perhaps many great people are just ordinary people who got lucky. Look, for instance, at how the Man Booker prize long and short lists are created and how the winner is chosen. It’s a ridiculously random process; almost nothing can be inferred.

If I ever teach Probability and Statistics – and it turns out I might have to soon – I’ll make Mlodinow’s book required reading. No, it's not a mathematical book full of incomprehensible equations. Quite the contrary: There's not a single equation and Mlodinow takes great pains to ensure his ideas are understood easily.
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There were about a dozen other books I began and skipped or skimmed. But unsystematic reading is almost apt since my mind wanders so much these days. Browsing through the Economist magazine, for instance, is an ideal sort of wandering: one glimpses so much of the world, current affairs, economics, science and technology. Switching from book to book, especially books with no relation, creates a similar experience.

Here's a sample from the last two months: Guy de Maupassant’s The House of Madame Tellier and Other Stories; Mukul Kesavan’s The Ugliness of the Indian Male; Patrick French’s The World is What It Is. More recently: Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate, a book that adds to the nature vs. nurture debate; The Redeemed Captive, a memoir set in the New England of the early 18th century when Indians, the French and the English were competing for territory; Claude Levi Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques, a work of anthropology, which many recommended, but which I could not read beyond a couple of chapters; David Duncan’s Hernando de Soto: A Savage Quest in the Americas, a biography of the great Spanish explorer, the so-called “discoverer” of the Mississippi, whose expedition through the American Southeast in the 16th century and whose hostile encounters with the Mississippian Indians there still remains mysterious – mysterious because the Indians vanished after De Soto’s expedition.

I’ve finally settled on Helen Epstein’s The Invisible Cure, which is about the history of AIDS in Africa. It is also a history of how the West and its multi-billion dollar aid industry got many things wrong.

And what does the future hold? The non fiction collection AIDS Sutra; Rajmohan Gandhi’s Mohandas, a biography of Gandhi from last year (the author is Gandhi’s grandson) – a massive book, but which beckons every time I look at my shelf. I’ve never read a biography of Gandhi, and I hardly know anything about his personal life. It is time to fill that gap .

Also on the list: The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico, the first person account of the conquistador Bernal Diaz del Castillo, which recounts the fall of the great Mexica city of Tenochtitlan, a surreal historical moment. I hope also I’ll enjoy Richard Dowden’s book on Africa; like the many books on India and China, heralding their rise, there are many gloomy ones about Africa. But this one –whether gloomy or not – is different, or so we’re told. Chinua Achebe likes it, and Achebe is a picky guy, especially when it comes to how people outside Africa write about it.

I’ll have to stop somewhere; otherwise this post will go on and on. Sometime in the future, I’ll be back with another post, about this or that magnificent book, and a new reading list. Until then,

Quotes from Leonard Mlodinow's The Drunkard's Walk

One of the best books I’ve read this year is Leonard Mlodinow’s The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Affects Our Lives. The title might sound a little like a self-help manual, but the book certainly isn’t. Instead, it’s one of the most eye-opening and philosophical texts I’ve read, the sort that changes the way you think and look at things. Mlodinow presents many great ideas, and I don’t have the time to review them, but here are some quotes that I feel encapsulate Mlodinow’s main points.

“…much of the order we perceive in nature belies an invisible underlying disorder and hence can be understood only through the rules of randomness.”

“Human perception, Faraday recognized, is not a direct consequence of reality but rather an act of imagination.”

“…in all aspects of our lives we encounter streaks and other peculiar patterns of success and failure. Sometimes success predominates, sometimes failure. Either way it is important in our own lives to take the long view and understand that streaks and other patterns that don’t appear random can indeed happen by pure chance. It is also important, when assessing others, to recognize that among a large group of people it would be very odd if one of them didn’t experience a long streak of successes or failures.” [Mlodinow's italics]

“The cord that tethers ability to success is both loose and elastic. It is easy to see fine qualities in successful books or to see unpublished manuscripts, inexpensive vodkas, or people struggling in any field as somehow lacking. It is easy to believe that ideas that worked were good ideas, that ideas and plans that did not were ill conceived. And it is easy to make heroes out of the most successful and to glance with disdain at the least. But ability does not guarantee achievement, nor is achievement proportional to ability. And so it is important to always keep in mind the other term in the equation – the role of chance.”

On Martin Meredith’s The Fate of Africa: A meandering review-essay

A significant caveat: I have never traveled to Africa, and therefore this is only armchair analysis. But one has to begin somewhere when one wants to engage with a topic or a region; and I do hope that whatever I read on Africa will be followed in the future with actual travel. Once I get to visit, my accounts will probably be more specific; I’ll probably be writing about a particular city or theme, rather than something as grand as the whole continent.

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Could a book have a bleaker title, a more damning indictment? The Fate of Africa: From the Hopes of Freedom to the Depths of Despair – what does it convey but gloominess, that Africa has hit rock bottom in all respects. There is good reason, one might say, for such pessimism: all the afflictions the world has seen in its entire history –starvation, totalitarianism, disease, genocide – have played themselves out in crippling fashion in Africa since Ghana’s landmark independence in 1957.

Why did things turn out this way? The answers, as always, are too complex to summarize in a few lines or even a book. European colonialism clearly played a major role, apportioning the continent according to its own whims and needs in the 19th century, creating arbitrary boundaries and forcing ethnic groups together that were not natural nations. Africa’s lack of large empires– if one ignores ancient Egypt, whose affiliations were as much Mediterranean as Nubian – meant there were no surviving institutions or an administrative framework (as existed in China and the Indian subcontinent) to mediate its encounter with Europe. And what did exist in some places broke under the weight of that infamous institution, slavery.

Consider one of the early interactions between Europe and Africa. When the Portuguese reached the mouth of the Congo as early as the 15th century, they found the sophisticated Kingdom of the Kongo, which encompassed a large area, and had an elaborate administrative system. Yet, within a hundred years, slave driving had devastated the kingdom. Slavery had existed in Congo earlier – as it had in virtually all regions of the world – but it worsened acutely as the Portuguese expanded in the New World.

(Depiction of the Kongo royalty encountering the Portuguese, from here.)

From those early times in the 15th century to the 19th, European physical presence in Africa was a faint imprint, but the demand for slaves had profound implications. The interior was largely unexplored, but played the relay role in the slave trade: supply and demand balancing out neatly, Africans as complicit in it as the Europeans.

It was only in the 19th century – with the help of so-called "journalist-explorers" like Henry Stanley, Africa’s most famous conquistador – that the interior of continent was mapped and opened for greater European control. About eight decades of colonialism later, as independence and sovereignty became the rage the world over, African nations awoke to their possibilities. But to join the modern world, one has to have the apparatus and institutions of modernity, and African nations were found lacking. Further, their leaders were faced with a most difficult task: “to weld into nations a variety of different peoples”, as Meredith puts it. The Cold War and the business of taking sides – a deadly one, whichever way you swung – wreaked havoc on many countries, Angola being a prime example. Caught in the crossfire, and betrayed by their own political elite who in rapaciousness sometimes surpassed their colonial predecessors, nations lurched from crisis to crisis. To compound the issue, Africa was saddled with one of the deadliest diseases in modern history. Even in Botswana, a successful country with little corruption and good infrastructure, approximately one in six Botswanans carries HIV.

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This, then, is the setting and context of Martin Meredith’s book, an encyclopedic digest of the politics and tragedies of Africa since 1957. From Ghana to Rwanda, from Algeria to South Africa, there is little that Meredith leaves untouched. The book inevitably chronicles a numbing sequence of mismanagements, civil wars, and cruelties. “Some 150,000 died,” he says while describing one crisis – I forget which – and moves on. Casually put, but apt: since so much has happened, numbers do not have the same impact or significance. One country blends into another; brutalities are eerily similar. As Meredith says at the beginning of the book, “Africa is a continent of great diversity but African states have much in common, especially misfortunes.”

Nevertheless, the book avoids generalities, and proceeds case by case. Beginning with Ghana in 1957, and moving chronologically on to other powerhouses – Nigeria, Egypt, Kenya, South Africa, and Zimbabwe – as well as covering a host of other smaller nations, Meredith reconstructs their post-independence histories. His account is strangely mixed: it sometimes reads like a dull newspaper article full of facts and figures; at other times it is insightful, expertly deconstructing famous African leaders – Kwame Nkrumah, Nelson Mandela, Mobutu, Thabo Mbeki – and their blunders.

Along with these piecewise narratives about nations and their trajectories, something of the larger geopolitics of Africa emerges too. When Angola slid into war, how did other countries align themselves? What were the dynamics during the Cold War? What were the consequences of America supporting Mobutu? What happened after the Rwandan genocide ended? If one is willing to patiently make the broader connections – which can get lost in a book of this size – the book is rewarding. For instance, the conflict in Rwanda did not end with the end of the genocide; it spilled over into the Congo, and continues to cause problems today. The resources of the Congo, in turn, acted like a vortex, enticing leaders of several neighboring countries – Yoweri Musevini of Uganda, Paul Kagame of Rwanda among others made untold riches even as war devastated the region in the late 90s.

While Meredith’s writing is lucid, it is devoid of the spark that the drama of personal discovery can add to such a narrative. But he probably wanted the most objective evaluation of Africa’s plight. His style is clearly that of a reporter's – Meredith was a foreign correspondent in Africa, and wrote for London Times and the Observer. His fundamental point, though, comes through very clearly: that Africa’s failure can be attributed to its leaders and politicians. His conclusion is summarized neatly by a quote of the famous Nigerian writer, Chinua Achebe. Achebe was writing about Nigeria, but his point applies broadly:

“The trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of leadership. There is nothing basically wrong with the Nigerian character. There is nothing wrong with the Nigerian land or climate or water or air or anything else. The Nigerian problem is the unwillingness or inability of its leaders to rise to the responsibility, to the challenge of personal example which are the hallmarks of true leadership.”

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The book’s title – a denouement of sorts – might indicate there is little chance of the continent redeeming itself. If one looks at the conflict that erupted after Kenya’s elections last December, or the never-ending authoritarianism of Mugabe, one might be tempted to agree with such a view. But history works in strange ways; no region or people can be written off. Already a broad pan-African sensibility is emerging, spurred by the common suffering of the last century and a half. The African Union, however ineffective it may seem to external observers, is an expression of that commonness. A larger sentiment was also at work when John Kufor and Kofi Annan of Ghana attempted to mediate the crises between the sparring Kenyan leaders, Mwai Kibaki and Raila Odinga early this year.

More importantly, Africa is better connected now – in terms of trade (though much more can be done on this front) and exchange of ideas – than ever before in history. Isolation, whether geographic or self-imposed, has been the bane of many societies. The Native Americans and the Aborigines of Australia, cut off as they were from the ideas, innovations and material goods of Europe and Asia for millennia, suffered immensely because of it. The same could be said of parts of Africa. But unlike the Native Americans, who declined in large numbers owing to European diseases, colonization and settlement and were thus unable to define their own destinies, Africans have another chance.

There is an additional aspect to this story of globalization: Already China and India are heavily engaged in Africa, and have sparked off a new scramble for its resources. To some this too is exploitation, the 21st century version, in essence similar to Europe’s plunder of Africa. China’s burgeoning presence in particular is raising some questions. But in the end, such exchanges of skills, ideas and material goods, if they happen gradually and if they are managed well – and that latter if is a big if – are mutually beneficial. Even in ancient times, the most powerful and robust societies were those that were well positioned to use the innovations of other regions. Africa will have to use its opportunity, and one feels it is the heavyweights – Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Tanzania, South Africa – that will have to lead the way.