Shalimar the Clown by Sir Salman Rushdie – Book Review

 

Publisher’s write-up:

‘Los Angeles, 1991. Maximilian Ophuls is knifed to death on the doorstep of his illegitimate daughter India, slaughtered by his Kashmiri driver, a mysterious figure who calls himself Shalimar the Clown. The dead man is a World War II Resistance hero, a man of formidable intellectual ability and much erotic appeal, a former United States ambassador to India, and subsequently America’s counter-terrorism chief. The murder looks at first like a political assassination but turns out to be passionately personal.

This is the story of Max, his killer, and his daughter – and of a fourth character, the woman who links them all. The story of a deep love gone fatally wrong, destroyed by a shallow affair, it is an epic narrative that moves from California to France, England, and above all, Kashmir: a ruined paradise, not so much lost as smashed.’

Shalimar the Clown is a novel from Salman Rushdie released in late 2000s, featuring four principal characters and a plot based in three different continents. As in most Rushdie novels, there is a story, featuring a particular family, with politics of the places involved in the background.

Coming to the plot – a former American diplomat is killed in the US by his driver. The story then moves back in time to Kashmir, featuring a rural Hindu girl Boonyi who is in love with Abdullah Noman, a Kashmiri Muslim who performs tightrope acts in the village. Despite their religious differences, the village elders are in favour of their marriage, which would also make the statement that they were Kashmiris before their religious identities.

On the other side, there is an ambitious man from Strasbourg, France – Max Ophuls. His tact and seductive skills make him a valuable asset for the French resistance against the Nazi regime during the Second World War. Following the war, he moves to the US and is posted to India as their ambassador, which is where Max’s love affair with Kashmir begins.

The story has four main characters and each of them have a segment named after them. The four are Max, India (Max’s daughter), Boonyi and the title character, Shalimar the Clown. This story moves across timelines and similar to the other Rushdie novels – with multiple complex characters – with some based in the West with ties to South Asia. The author often plays along people having multiple identities and acting accordingly – for instance, Max – a Frenchman from a region which has often shifted between France and Germany, with a British wife, and later becoming a US diplomat.

The political shift and radicalisation that took place in Kashmir was brought out well by the author – where a culture that encouraged an interfaith marriage and participated in social events together regardless of religion; were taken to violence and eventual doom. The effect the conflict had on civilians was brought out well – be it atrocities from the Muslim extremists or Indian army.

An equally interesting character was the title character – Shalimar the Clown, who was content staying in the village who had fallen in love with Boonyi, who had bigger ambitions and did not want to be ‘stuck’ in the same place and was looking for an opportunity to leave. However, the segment with both Shalimar and Boonyi was a tad long – with too many characters being introduced and beyond a point, it became difficult to keep track of them, especially considering that they were important in the subsequent phases.

The author being an atheist himself, did not have second thoughts in bringing out absurdities in religion, where a bit of dark humour was involved when a group of Muslim women pacify an extremist mob by using the religious limitations that the men have.

Without spoilers, I would say that I was not satisfied with the ending of the book. It was not particularly bad, but considering the way that the story was going, it was not quite what I expected.

On a personal level – this story was highly relatable for me, considering I have lived most of my life in India and a substantial portion in France (my current residence), and all the principal characters are from these places, and I really enjoyed the description of the city of Strasbourg, loved it as much as my visit to the city. So, if you could relate with the underlying themes, you could enjoy it better, but regardless, it is a great read.

To conclude – this could be classified as a cliched story involving love, ambition, jealousy and revenge but what makes it special is the narration, and the subtle themes going on in the background. If you have enjoyed other works of Rushdie, this would be an enjoyable read too – I would not place it quite at the level of Midnight’s Children or The Satanic Verses, but a notch below and on that note, I would award this book a rating of seven on ten.

Rating – 7/10

Have a nice day,
Andy

The Culture Map by Erin Meyer – Book Review

 

Publisher’s write-up:

‘Americans precede anything negative with three nice comments; French, Dutch, Israelis, and Germans get straight to the point; Latin Americans and Asians are steeped in hierarchy; Scandinavians think the best boss is just one of the crowd. It's no surprise that when they try and talk to each other, chaos breaks out.

In The Culture Map, INSEAD professor Erin Meyer is your guide through this subtle, sometimes treacherous terrain in which people from starkly different backgrounds are expected to work harmoniously together. She provides a field-tested model for decoding how cultural differences impact international business, and combines a smart analytical framework with practical, actionable advice.’

The Culture Map is a book explaining the cultural differences between various places and why it is important to understand them in order to make multicultural teams work. The book is from the American professor based in France, Erin Meyer, and she describes eight scales required to understand cultural differences and navigate through them.

The eight she describes are communicating, evaluating, persuading, leading, deciding, trusting, disagreeing, scheduling. And for each of these, the writer has a binary scale (example: for leading – egalitarian vs hierarchical) and the book is split into eight chapters for each of them. Most of them are supported by her own experiences in the corporate world and occasional references to books or studies.

The only takeaway I had from the book is that we need to be conscious that people behave in a certain way for cultural reasons or some other reason and not necessarily to offend the person the other person. This is a benefit of doubt that I believe people ought to be given regardless of cultural differences (even your next-door neighbour from childhood). It was interesting to note that cultural perceptions are relative – where in her book – she states how Germany is strict about timings, France relatively less and India is flexible and thus, a German feels that the French are too flexible with timings and Indians feel they are too rigid. Having been raised in India myself, I would say that for me, coming late for no reason is not good behaviour anywhere, including India.

There was an occasion where she mentioned that some of her observations are ‘dramatic oversimplifications’. I would go further and say that it was not some, but most of her book – building on stereotypes and biases. While it is true that some stereotypes could be true, acting on them as the author suggests could lead put oneself on a very slippery slope.

The book seemed low on research – no references on studies or the data or sample size she had used to build her eight scales axes for the various parameters. The book was entirely based on her personal experiences, while individual experiences provide valuable lessons, the conclusions she has drawn from these personal anecdotes are too strong. This is pertinent considering this was not a book recounting her experiences in the corporate world across geographies, but a book providing instructions on how to prepare presentations or engage in corporate negotiations to its readers.

Owing to her personal experiences, she appears to have knowledge on US and western Europe (particularly France, UK, Germany and the Netherlands). However, her knowledge of Asia seemed superficial and often contradictory, where on the one side, she refers to a supposed Confucian culture sphere which courts a very large territory from Vietnam, China, Korea till Japan and on the other side, talking about how different Chinese and Japanese cultures are.

Culture is a factor that is not solely influenced by nationality, it could play a large part but there is also the question of environment, rural or urban upbringing, etc. There could be various distinct cultures within the same sovereign state – where the author herself often refers to herself as a Minnesota mother, not an American mother or even the subnational Midwestern mother.

I would have been perhaps interested if she touched upon what enforces the culture among large groups of people – is it the family traditions? The school system? She does partially try to answer this by saying her son has a ‘French culture’ because of attending a French school but does not elaborate on that. While she comfortably puts people in boxes as per their passports, she does avoid placing multicultural states in Europe in any of the axes or even discuss them – like Belgium or Switzerland. For that matter, when France, Germany, Netherlands and the UK can be seen as being so distinct, it is rather naïve to paint large multi-ethnic countries like India or China with one brush.

While it could be important to navigate the cultural differences, this book does not provide solutions. I have met the equivalent of nearly every person in her anecdotes during my period in the corporate world and they were not necessarily from the countries that the author described and sometimes, from the ‘opposite culture’ (according to this book).

This book is largely targeted at Americans and plays on American stereotypes and biases, it could provide some insights to people who have hardly had interactions with people from other parts of the world. To those who have had, this book is inaccurate and does not help. On that note, I award the book a rating of four on ten.

Rating – 4/10

Have a nice day,
Andy

The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel – Book Review

Publisher’s write-up:

‘Doing well with money isn’t necessarily about what you know. It’s about how you behave. And behavior is hard to teach, even to really smart people.

How to manage money, invest it, and make business decisions are typically considered to involve a lot of mathematical calculations, where data and formulae tell us exactly what to do. But in the real world, people don’t make financial decisions on a spreadsheet. They make them at the dinner table, or in a meeting room, where personal history, your unique view of the world, ego, pride, marketing, and odd incentives are scrambled together.

In The Psychology of Money, the author shares 19 short stories exploring the strange ways people think about money and teaches you how to make better sense of one of life’s most important matters.’

The Psychology of Money is a collection of twenty essays from Morgan Housel – fund manager and former columnist to the Wall Street Journal. The author focuses on how staying wealthy is behavioural than the ability to earn.

To build his case, the book starts with the story of Ronald Read – who had a very different profile compared to other multi-millionaire philanthropists; that he was a janitor and gas station in a small town in Vermont, US. This was the result of frugal living and investing most of the savings in blue chip stocks resulting in compounded gains over the years. Most of us wish to be millionaires but the reasons why we wish to be millionaires in most cases is not for financial independence but rather, a desire to spend a million dollars, which is very different from being a millionaire.

Considering this paradox where to be wealthy, you should not be spending it; the author builds the case for saving money over the many essays. Most of it was behavioural advice which is simple to follow in personal life.

This book was well presented and was simple to read. As promised by the author, each of these essays were short; the 20^th essay being his own journey of accumulating wealth. Some of the observations were important, being an economics graduate myself – one of the fundamental assumptions we have is that financial decisions are rational; though from the perspective of personal economics, it is difficult to be fully rational (need to be only reasonably rational). To elaborate on that, when debt is available cheap and the market returns are higher than the cost of debt – an absolutely rational decision would mean to buy the car or house with debt; however, what is not valued is that people like being debt free and that leads to the decision of buying a major asset at once if the means are available.

The book had the following takeaways – that it is important to save, staying wealthy is largely behavioural and that it is easy to embrace some of these behaviours. A statement from the book, that is very true is:

‘The hardest financial skill is getting the goalpost to stop moving.’

This book could be read by all – but if you are looking for ways to make quick money, this book is not for you. That is perhaps the drawback of the book – that it focuses more on savings and compounding of savings and many who live paycheque to paycheque often do not have a choice when it comes to savings.

There were also times I felt that the book could have been better researched; in the notes, the author had stated their source to be ‘Quora’; which is a question-and-answer website where anyone could write an answer; hardly a reliable source. While the author’s point greed was well made, so was the example of Rajat Gupta, former CEO of McKinsey convicted for insider trading; there seems to be a temptation to portray any person with an Indian origin as having had a ‘rags to riches’ story. While Gupta did achieve enormous riches in the US, he certainly was not from the slums of Calcutta as the book described but from a privileged Indian family.

To conclude, this is an easy to read, well researched book and could be read especially by those who still have a long way to go before retirement, as they are the ones who have the maximum potential to tap into the strategies presented by the author. On that note, I would award the book a rating of six on ten.

Rating – 6/10

Have a nice day,
Andy

The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales by Oliver Sacks – Book Review

Publisher’s write-up:

‘In this extraordinary book, Dr. Oliver Sacks recounts the stories of patients struggling to adapt to often bizarre worlds of neurological disorder. Here are people who can no longer recognize everyday objects or those they love; who are stricken with violent tics or shout involuntary obscenities; who have been dismissed as autistic or retarded, yet are gifted with uncanny artistic or mathematical talents. If inconceivably strange, these brilliant tales illuminate what it means to be human.’

This is a book with description on 24 different clinical cases of Dr. Oliver Sacks during his career. Sacks was a neurologist from the UK who practised in the US. It needs to be mentioned that the book was published in 1985 and thus, some of the terms used are not appropriate today (eg. retarded).

The book is split into four parts – losses, excesses, transports and the world of the simple. Each of these sections had clinical cases related to the main theme – the title story The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat was under the section of ‘losses’, which was about a music professor who was suffering from visual agnosia. Transports included stories (for lack of a better word) where the patients felt transported to another location based on their past memories. In most of these clinical tales, the author also added a postscript – of similar cases the author learnt of in the future or how their patient dealt with their difficulty.

To put it bluntly, this book was neither interesting nor informative. In any non-fiction, it is reasonable to demand who is the intended audience – the public at large or those involved in the field of neuroscience? However, I felt this book pleases neither; to someone like myself with no background in the subject – this book was very technical with several technical terms thrown at me as though it was a given that an average reader would understand them. On the other hand, for someone actually in the field might feel that they do not learn anything new from this book. Moreover, I thought I was in for a scientific reading and I was disturbed by the author’s use of the word soul as though it was a medical concept; I can understand the intent – that the author wants to bring out the human in his patients and is thus randomly throwing this word around like any philosopher does, but that just makes this book lose direction.

I did mention initially that the book was published in 1985 – but at the same time, there is a foreword from the author published in 2001. Considering that, the least that he could have done was to revise some of the words that he had used so casually in this book (like ‘retard’).

My only takeaway from this book was there are several rare neurological conditions which could lead to difficulties / advantages (in some cases) – this was something that I already knew, and this book added no further information to that.

The author was perhaps a great doctor, but writing is certainly not one of his skills and this could have been a better book if there had been a co-author. On that note, I would award this book a rating of two.

Rating – 2/10

Have a nice day,
Andy

Atomic Habits by James Clear – Book Review

 

Publisher’s write-up:

‘World-renowned habits expert James Clear has discovered a simpler system for transforming your life. He knows that lasting change comes from the compound effect of hundreds of small decisions – doing two push-ups a day, waking up five minutes early, or holding a single short phone call. He calls them atomic habits.

In this ground-breaking book, Clear reveals how these tiny changes will help you get 1 percent better every day. He uncovers a handful of simple life hacks (the forgotten art of Habit Stacking, the unexpected power of the Two Minute Rule, or the trick to entering the Goldilocks Zone) and delves into cutting-edge psychology and neuroscience to explain why they matter. Along the way, he tells inspiring stories of Olympic gold medalists, leading CEOs and distinguished scientists who have used the science of small habits to stay productive, motivated and happy.

These small changes will have a revolutionary effect on your career, your relationships and your life.’

Atomic Habits is a self-help book that helps its readers build effective habits. I read the book The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg a few years back which was along similar lines. James Clear, the author of this book has drawn inspiration from The Power of Habit; the issue was that much as I read the book from Charles Duhigg, the implementation was not easy. I was suggested by some of my friends that this book helps us implement the changes that leads to building habits.

The author starts by introducing himself and about a terrible accident that had occurred while playing baseball; and went on to build habits that helped him excel in the same sport post recovery. The title is then explained – that the focus ought to be on the systems and processes that drive our habits – and what we need to do is several atomic changes to our way of working, which would eventually lead to better habits.

To go about this, the author proposes four laws – make it obvious, make it attractive, make it easy and make it satisfying. The author has a dedicated section to each of these ‘laws’ and proposes methods to implement them. He also brings about the important point that the ‘atomic habits’ process applies even for undesirable habits, the reason why we are unable to change several things about our way of doing things which we are unable to change.

I could relate to almost everything that the author had written in the book and I believe most of you would be able to do it as well. I made the same mistake of focusing on the goal (example: like keeping my place organised and clean) instead of focusing on the process that is involved. We tend to load all the activities required for achieving a goal at once, which inevitably makes it a difficult task; thereby making it less attractive. And if I do such an activity once in a while, I am going to end up with an unorganised room in no time since I did not focus on the process.

I liked the way the author presented the book – where he wanted the reader to have the takeaways and at the end of each chapter, there was a summary and also links to his website where we could download resources to implement the methods he had laid out.

For a quick verdict, as on the date of writing this review, it has been a month since I have read his book and a lot of his suggestions seem to have worked. The long-term impact remains to be seen; and I would need to take into account the author’s caveat – that negative habits have the same rules as positive habits and we could plunge into negative habits the same way we create a positive routine.

To conclude on the book, I was very satisfied with reading the book and the suggestions that the author presented – they are simple, easy to read and possible to follow. I wish I had read this book earlier. On that note, I would award the book a rating of nine on ten.

Rating – 9/10

Have a nice day,
Andy

The Book Collectors of Daraya (Les passeurs de livre de Daraya) by Delphine Minoui – Book Review

 

Afin de lire mon avis en français, cliquez ici

Publisher’s write-up :

‘In 2012 the rebel suburb of Daraya in Damascus was brutally besieged by Syrian government forces. Four years of suffering ensued, punctuated by shelling, barrel bombs and chemical gas attacks. People’s homes were destroyed and their food supplies cut off; disease was rife.

Yet in this man-made hell, forty young Syrian revolutionaries embarked on an extraordinary project, rescuing all the books they could find in the bombed-out ruins of their home town. They used them to create a secret library, in a safe place, deep underground. It became their school, their university, their refuge. It was a place to learn, to exchange ideas, to dream and to hope.

Based on lengthy interviews with these young men, conducted over Skype by the award-winning French journalist Delphine Minoui, The Book Collectors of Daraya is a powerful testament to freedom, tolerance and the power of literature.’

Note: I read the book in French

The Book Collectors of Daraya is a book on the underground library in a Damascus suburb named Daraya, managed by four young men. It is written by the journalist Delphine Minoui, who has worked for more than a decade covering the Middle East. In this book, she has not only written about the library but also about the city, the four people whom she interviewed for this book and also the situation in Syria, since the start of the civil war in 2011 (this book was published in 2017).

This started when the author read a Facebook post from the page ‘Humans of Syria, which talked about a man named Ahmad, one of the persons in charge of an underground library. Daraya is a rebel-controlled Damascus suburb and under the rubbles of the houses destroyed by the bombings of the Assad regime were books of all kinds, classics, philosophy, self-help, etc. Even though Ahmad was initially sceptical about the idea as he considered books to be a means of propaganda of the regime, he saw this as an act of rebellion and made the library a symbol of resistance (also need to consider that they found some books that were banned by the regime).

Even though the writer is a journalist who reports on events, this is a book on the people, mainly her four key contacts, being Ahmad, her principal interlocutor; Shadi – the young photographer who was like a ‘journalist’ but at the same time, also a witness to the atrocities; Omar – a combatant for the Free Syrian Army and the intellectual of the group and Hussam – who was maintaining a long-distance relationship.  I liked that these people had their strong principles that they were not ‘thieves’ but mere guardians of the books and had noted the original owners of each of these books and promised to have it returned once the war was over. I did not know much about the city of Daraya before I read the book but based on what I understood from what was written, this was probably a suburb of the bourgeoisie considering how cosmopolitan Ahmed’s interests were – who enjoys films of Amélie Poulain and the works of Paulo Coelho. In the modern world, the elites have a cushion during most crises and manage to avoid the worst of it, but war is an exception, where everyone is reduced to a situation where having the basic needs covered is a luxury.

I liked that she did pose some difficult questions which were necessary, like when she asked Omar if he considered himself a jihadist. It was also interesting that even after all the bombing by the Assad regime, Daraya was under civilian control and not the military (neither the Free Syrian Army, nor the Al Nusra Front or ISIS) and that was the reason why a majority of the young in the town could avoid being radicalised.

To read books of this kind is not easy, especially where it inadvertently ends up having an element of suspense as I was very worried thinking about whether these four young men survived as at the end of this book. The only difference between a thriller novel and this is that this on real people and not a character in a book.

I was recalling what I used to think during the start of the Arab Spring, when Mubarak’s regime collapsed, followed by the lynching, and deposing of Gaddafi, my immediate thought was that ‘the next is probably going to be the Assad family in Syria’. Three years later, I was embarrassed by my naivete, considering the situation in Syria which ended up being a gory civil war made worse by a dirty geopolitical game played by the different powers within and outside the region. Maybe for me, all this was merely an intellectual exercise and does not directly affect me in any way but the sad part is that a lot of these young people in Syria had the same hope, that it was their turn next to dethrone the dictator and obtain their freedom; and it is unfortunate that we are very far away from that at present.

I felt that sometimes, the bias that the author had towards the Free Syrian Army was apparent, and she presented a black and white picture where FSA was composed of fighters who fought for justice and that cruelty was the only aspect of the Assad regime. I am neither justifying Assad nor am I tarnishing FSA but the situation for sure is a lot more complicated than that. I am sure that the author is more competent than I am on this subject, but this book is very short (160 pages) and she could have written a longer book giving more details.

She tried to touch upon a lot of subjects, we had a lot of interesting information in bits and pieces. For example, I was wondering where the women of Daraya were during all this chaos and out of nowhere, a letter written by the women to François Hollande (the then president of France) appears. And then, nothing, again. Perhaps we could dismiss it easily as a cultural constraint when it comes to the involvement of women, but I am sure that at a time of crisis, these constraints are not going to work and we would be able to see the best out of every person (or the worst, depending on which side one is on).

Since she is a journalist, she has the style of writing typical of that of a journalist; while I find no fault with that, I often felt that I was reading the news again on the civil war. I was more interested in knowing about the people impacted than the history surrounding it (which is available in many other sources). I also understand that not all the readers are fully informed on the situation and thus, it is important to give the context, but under such circumstances, as aforementioned, it is better to have written a longer book.

Pour conclure, c’est un livre intéressant, facile à lire même si c’est triste. C’est un peu déséquilibre, j’estime deux tiers vers l’histoire et le reste sur les quatre hommes et la bibliothèque. Je donne le livre une note de sept sur dix.

To conclude, I would say that this is an interesting book, easy to read even though it is a recollection of sad events. It is a bit lopsided; I reckon two thirds towards the recent history of Daraya and Syria and large and the remaining on the four men and the library that they managed. I award the book a rating of seven on ten.

Rating – 7/10

Have a nice day,
Andy

Witch Hunt by Ian Rankin – Book Review

 

Publisher’s write-up:

‘Witch is a terrorist – on of the best – but this job is going to test even her to the very limit. This time her cold calculation may desert her just when she needs it most.

One her tail are three very different detectives – one woman, two men. Two at the beginning of their careers; one staking a lifetime’s experience on tracking Witch down, following a hunch to the end.

Dominic Elder’s hunch takes him from England to Europe and back, but the clues that solve the biggest crimes, dig out the deepest secrets, are often the smallest ones – ones that only the junior sleuths, fresh out of spy school, pick up. But will he listen?’

Witch Hunt is a spy thriller novel written by Ian Rankin under the name Jack Harvey, a name he used in the 90s for writing thriller novels. This book came out in the 90s and thus, the limitations then must be kept in mind, especially when one of the characters is supposed to be tech savvy.

The story starts with a woman crossing the English Channel in a boat, destroying the boat but deliberately leaving traces behind. Back in the UK, this interests Dominic Elder – a retired MI5 operative, who has a history with the modus operandi of this kind of a crime, a terrorist whom he has codenamed the witch. Elder comes out of retirement and sends the young Michael Barclay off to France to trace the Witch while focusing on what is the terrorist’s intent in the UK. Amidst all this, is also the tussle between different agencies – the MI5, the MI6, local police, the French secret service (DST), etc.

The premise of the plot was interesting and being a crime novel writer, the author maintained the mystery around the Witch character, perhaps a tad too long for a thriller novel. The initial few pages are gripping which kept me curious enough to gather more details about the Witch. However, too many characters were introduced in the initial pages – it took a while for the main character Elder to appear, and then there was Barclay – who reported to his boss Joyce Parry, and on the other side, there were detectives Greenleaf and Doyle, along with several characters introduced on both sides of the English Channel during Elder and Barclay’s travels in England and France, respectively. I could focus only on four characters when it came to their character development and could not devote attention to the principal antagonist, the Witch, either.

Red herrings are great for a police procedural whodunnit novels, but not so for a thriller. Considering the way this novel ended, a lot of events were unnecessary or were mere distractions. This meant that the book need not have been as long as what it turned out to be. I normally enjoy Rankin’s writing, but I realise that it happens when I enjoy the plot along with it, in this book I felt that he was unnecessarily verbose.

This was a book where I felt a good start was ruined by the way it carried on – normally I like plots that revolve around the world and in fact, I enjoyed one of the earlier Jack Harvey thriller novels, namely Blood Hunt, to the extent that I thought perhaps, Jack Harvey is a better writer than Ian Rankin and that thriller novels are his calling. I might try the last remaining Jack Harvey novel in due course but for now, I would prefer going back to his Inspector Rebus novels.

On that note, I would award this book a rating of four on ten.

Rating – 4/10

Have a nice day,
Andy