An Open Letter to Barak Obama

Hi Obama,

We appreciate that you have been sincere in moving the Indo-US relationship to a higher plane of bilateral cooperation in various spheres. We also admire you in India for being the Mr Cool of international politics. But your response to India’s demand to extradite the CEO of Union Carbide has been one of disappointment.

Your refusal to extradite Anderson to India not just makes one suspect your sincerity about Indo-US relations but also brings to focus the inconsistency in your approach in dealing with a similar problem facing the two nations: your response to the Gulf of Maxico gas tragedy is at stark contrast with how you have responded to India’s demand for extradition. How does this inconsistency square up with your claims to promote relations with India? How does it fit in with your reputation as a leader who is above general humdrum of politicians who only care about their constituencies?

The gas leakage in a Union Carbide factory claimed thousands of lives and left many more physically challenged for life. The subsequent generations were born with ailments and handicaps. The toxic gas had so maimed the victims and affected the subsequent generations that in photos they appear like remains of prehistoric humans excavated from a geological site.

The victims and their families are still awaiting justice. They say those who died were lucky as they escaped being humiliated. Do you know how much Union Carbide paid in compensation? $500 per victim! And to add to their indignation comes your smug refusal to extradite the culprit.

There are clear reports indicting Union Carbide for not putting in place any safety measures. The reports also indict the company for not informing the people residing around the factory after the leakage started. If the company officials had done so, then the damage could be minimized. The accident took place just a month before the company’s license to manufacture the toxic gas would expire. One can understand the lackadaisical approach of Union Carbide.

The Maxico gas disaster has wreaked lower scale of human tragedy and your government has promised adequate compensation to every affected family. We appreciate your concern for them. We don't need compensation from your government. (In fact, given our current friendship, we could give you some.) But don’t you think the least you could do for the victims of Bhupal gas tragedy was help India bring Anderson to justice under Indian laws and in the land where he perpetrated the crime?

In the meantime, some of us have to answer for a few things as well.

Take care, and hope to see you in India this November.

Indrasish.

Ascent of Money - by Niall Ferguson

I am always a little skeptical to pick up a book on finance or economy because I fear that I might not understand most things. Ascent of Money by Niall Ferguson confirms the fear but it also suggests that a readable book can be arresting regardless of its topic.

The Ascent of Money traces the evolution of financial system – through the growth of banks, bonds, etc. – and how they influenced course of events (if not always the final outcome) of apparently non-financial matters. The book explains how difficult it is to understand the causes that influenced the turn of great historical events without visiting the backwaters of financial dealings and the men who did them.

The book, however, will sometimes put you off with chunks of intricate financial details. The author could have tried a little harder to simply matters for the uninitiated reader.

Among the interesting facts the book brings to light, I want to share this one with you. Shylock, the Jew money lender from Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, reflects the condition of Venetian Jews of his times, the community that invented loan sharking, lending small amount of loans at high interest rates. Hounded from other places, a sizable population of Jews had flocked in Venice, Italy. The Venetian authority had demarcated a place in the town for the Jews to stay and banned them from all forms of businesses, leaving them the option of money lending.

This professional choice had met with religious sanction in the Old Testament, the religious book of Judaism, albeit in a round-about way. The Old Testament forbids the Jew from Usering (lending money) but also presents an exit clause. The Jew shouldn't lend money to his brethren, the book ordains. Taken in another way, it can mean the Jew is free to participate in money-lending as long as he his lending money to a person outside the Jewish community.

According to the author, the Merchant of Venice perfectly establishes the ground rules of loan sharking. The judge’s ruling that Shylock cloud insist on his claim - a pound of flesh from Antonio’s chest - but without shedding a drop of blood – shows how loan sharking works:

a)The lender’s right to claim his money
b) The importance of court in settling financial disputes without recourse to violence
c)Linkage of interest rates with risks: when Antonio had agreed to become the guarantor of the loan, Shylock had forecasted – although Antonio was wealthy and so a good guarantor, his source of wealth was fleet of ships going to various parts of the world – a business which is always fraught with risks.

The book has many such interesting trivia.

Saturday Rains and Wisdom Tooth

Of the seven days in a week, I await Saturdays the most. And when a Saturday goes wrong, it leaves me sulking until another arrives. This Saturday was one such Saturday.

This Saturday I had an appointment with a dentist whose chamber is located very far from where I stay. The appointment was at 6:30 in the evening and a few hours before that, he SMSed me postponing it by one hour – at 7:30. A little before I was to start for his chamber, it began to drizzle with an overcast sky promising heavy downpour later.

Undeterred, I walked out into the road and stepped into an auto. A few minutes into the auto ride, and the rain got steadier. It didn’t take very long for the roads to get wet and the potholes to be filled with water. I could also hear a storm piercing the noise of the rain.

The auto entered the neighborhood of Frazer Town, where the dental chamber was located, and found a traffic jam awaiting it. The rain eased and the storm passed after sometime leaving the air thick and humid.

The lane that connects Frazor Town with the area was blocked, and a flock of men stood around something. “What’s the matter,” I asked a person. “The storm felled a tree blocking the lane, “he replied.

I decided to leave the auto and walk to the clinic. I approached an elderly man to ask the direction. He said walking would take a long time, but it was the only option as the buses and autos going that way had got stranded in the jam.

I was in an old part of Bangalore with decrepit houses, cheap restaurants and dark narrow lanes. And the rain had made it worse. The pavements were dirty and narrow; I had to pick my way through stranded vehicles.

After around an hour, well past the scheduled time, I was at the clinic. About three years ago I had a root canal therapy done on one of my teeth – and had a porcelain crown mounted on it. The crown, being an artificial structure, had not fitted in properly with the other teeth around it forming small crevices that attracted food deposits. The tooth is located on the upper side in front of a wisdom tooth. If the wisdom tooth was extracted, it would solve the problem, Dr Donald said.

A wisdom tooth doesn't participate in any important activity like chewing, for example. And many people either don’t have them naturaly or have them plucked, he assured. I’m yet to make up my mind whether I want to part with mine.

I left the chamber at 10 PM, and by the time I reached home, it was 11, only an hour short of the end of Saturday. Many in Mumbai would say 11 in the evening is when a day starts - but Bangalore is forced to go to bed earlier by law-enforcement agencies.

A Million Mutinies Now - A Book on Cities and People

Currently I am reading a travel book and ever since I started reading the book, my hands were itching to write a short take on it. The book is A Million Mutinies Now by VS Naipaul. This is my first Naipaul book – and although I had read travel articles and essays both in books and magazines, this is the first time I am reading a book solely dedicated to travel.

There is nothing new to say about Naipaul as a writer because, as a Nobel Prize winner, he is among the most written about. But, when you read a book, you develop your own views about the writer and some of them can be distinct from commonly held ones. So I decided to put mine here.

The book is on India and it gives glimpses of various facets of Indian life through the lives of people staying in Indian metropolis. The book shows how very ordinary things - ordinary people, their lives and struggle - can be your window to a city, its character, politics, economy and history. There is also a little about the rural India that the writer sees as he travels through various parts of the country. Naipaul interviews people and narrates their lives in a story-telling manner. Every person he interviews throws up a distinct side of a city.

The picture of Naipaul that emerges through his writing is very different from how the media paint him – a literary snob with no patience for others opinions. There is no snobbery in how he deals with his characters except when their occasional English (they mostly speak in native language and there is a person translating it into English for Naipaul) doesn’t meet his approval. But he likes to call a spade a spade: a vegetable market that's dirty and smelly is a vegetable market that's dirty and smelly. While narrating his characters' lives, his thrust is on storytelling and he tells the stories with empathy and understanding without being judgmental. At the same time, he captures minute details of how his characters live and behave bringing their worlds alive.

I have not finished the book but sensed that Naipaul’s writing is addictive. Once you take a dip, he pulls you deeper and deeper, disallowing you to keep the book shut for too long.

What Makes a Bookstore Work

The other day, while I was on my way back home, a hoarding drew my attention: Sapna Book Store – the largest book store of India. I stepped in to check the veracity of the claim.

The store is a three-storied affair which offers many things apart from books: CDs, gift items etc. They have a floor dedicated to each type of things on offer. A part of the third floor is apportioned for books. There are different sections for different genres of books – and, although the book section is not very large, the collection is quite impressive.

I also liked how they handle their customers. They have salesmen loitering in the book section but they help you only if you approach for help, unlike some other places where there is a person trailing you whichever part of the store you walk to, soliciting unsolicited help.

It irritates because you don’t always visit a store with the intention buying books but just to browse. It also denies you the privacy and escape you expect a bookstore to provide. It causes the suspicion: “Do they think I’m going to flick a book and walk out?” Exasperated, you walk out after a while. I had a similar experience with Oxford bookstore in Calcuta.

Over time, you get addicted to a bookstore. The atmosphere, how books are arranged, everything seems distinct and makes you feel at home. If it plays a light music, it can add to the atmospherics (readers mostly have very refined musical sensibilities, so you have to be discreet with what music you play). A visit to the place becomes an experience and a must. And, if the store is sprawling, it’s merrier. Landmark in Bangalore gives me this feeling.

It is sometimes difficult to pin down what makes a bookstore special, though. Gangarams, the oldest bookstore in Bangalore located on MG Road, doesn’t have any of the attributes of Landmark. Gangarams is shabbily maintained, cramped for space, disorganized, dusty. But these work out to its advantage, giving it a warm old-world charm.

A very well-maintained bookstore may appear too mechanical to be comfortable. When I visit a Crosswords outlet anywhere, I find it a little distant. A disheveled look of Landmark and Gangarams makes me feel at home when it comes to books.

Just Read - A Network of Libraries

Just Read, a network of libraries, has set up an outlet in our office campus. They have several schemes for membership and book hiring on offer. There are periodic membership fees and apart from that, the reader has to pay a deposit which is returnable. I am not fond of libraries because, being a slow reader, I fail to finish a book within the permitted time and attract late fees. With Just Read, I don’t have to do that. The reader can keep a book for as long as he/she wants. The deposit protects the library against unreturned books.

I was not so impressed with their collection. They mostly have American best sellers for fiction. There are no Amitava Ghoshs, Naipauls, Rushdis, RK Narayans etc. Nor did I find a section dedicated to classics. The non-fiction collection is also limited. The grand old man of Indian English writing – Kushwant Singh – looked at me from several book covers, but the books were only his non-fiction ones.

My colleague, reluctant to betray his ignorance about books, walked to the shelf dedicated to management books. Holding a book in hand – something like 10 Points on Success – he said, “It’s simply best.” Which means the book is so good that its superlative merit is beyond any shred of doubt. The book jacket didn’t look so promising at least.

The problem with Just Read is its lack of space. The outlet occupies a slim slice of space with just three rows. With so little space you can’t house a sizable body of collection; you have to keep small measures of many types. And that’s what you get there.

I don’t know how big their other shops are, though.

I like the concept of chain libraries; I didn't know they existed. You get to read books without having to pay too much for them and without the books eating into your living space.

Lucky Holi

Sometimes the most daunting problems resolve themselves surprisingly easily.

Yesterday was Holi, the festival of colors, and a holiday for the India part of our company. I usually don’t keep track of holidays and a week earlier, when I had scheduled a meeting with our US counterparts, not surprisingly I didn’t know I had scheduled the meeting on the holiday. A colleague informed me a few days later, but by that time the invitation had been accepted by all the invitees and I was reluctant to reschedule the meeting. (We use a software application which sends out invitations in form of mail and when the invitee accepts the invitation, the sender is sent an intimation of the same.)

The meeting was from 10PM to 11PM, the time when my area experiences a sustained power cut. While even without power, I would be able to join the meeting from my personal phone, the power cut wouldn’t allow me to access office network from my laptop, disallowing me to share information with the other participants. (I work in an IT outsourcing environment where you are allowed to work at home sometimes.)

So avoiding the risk of power cut, I decided to attend the call from office. I called up the office cab helpdesk and booked a cab for me. The cab would pick me from my home around 40 minutes before the meeting; that is just as long it takes you to go to office from my place.

It was around 9PM and the cab was expected in another 40 minutes – which meant 40 minutes were all I had to get ready and finish dinner. I got ready, rushed through dinner and started waiting for the cab. 20 minutes later, I was still waiting; the cab hadn’t arrived. I dropped the plan of going to the office and decided to attend the meeting from home - there were only a few minutes to go for the meeting to start, after all.

Thankfully, when I walked back home, there was no power cut. But how long would the power relent? What if the power went out the moment I started talking on the call? What an embarrassment would that be – with seven participants and all dependent on me! I knew I didn’t have myself to blame; I had tried my best to reach the office.

The call started. Everyone joined at the other end. Hoping for the best, I started my demonstration. I had to share an idea with the participants and develop a consensus in favour of the idea. When I finished the demonstration, someone at the other end said, “This is what I expected.” And others followed suit.

Finally, we agreed to conclude the meeting.

The meeting lasted for 15 minutes instead of the scheduled one hour, and the power was still there.