Treasure Island - Robert Louis Stevenson

There are books that come and sink without a trace and there are books that figure in literary discussions even centuries after they were written. Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson is one of them.


I had read a book on the day-to-day account of Christopher Columbus’s voyages to the Indies and had developed interest in stories about people from the Western world travelling to obscure lands in search of treasure. Treasure Island for me is part of the family of such adventure books written in 18th and 19th centuries.

However, Treasure Island is conventionally considered as a book for children, like Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Dafoe. As a kid I had read Robinson Crusoe as part of my school syllabus and remembered the story vaguely and used to confuse it with Treasure Island. Reading Treasure Island helped me separate the two.

Treasure Island is written in first person and the hero, Jim Hawking, narrates the story. Jim comes to know of a treasure trove tucked away in an unknown island. He together with others goes to the island in search of it. They meet with lot of challenges on their voyage, wading through rebellions, fights, switching of loyalties etc., they finally get to the treasure.

The characters have no grown-up complexities. Their simplicity, however, is their strength – it endears and immortalizes them to the reader. Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Homes is one such character. A reviewer had written that had Arthur Conan Doyle been a better writer and sketched Sherlock Homes more skillfully, the detective would be forgotten by now.

The fact that Sherlock Homes is nothing but the sum up of some styles (how he lights up his pipe, how he delivers his repartees, how he dresses etc – not personality traits but style statements) has made him easily interpretable to successive generations and adaptable to movies. Similarly, if you read Treasure Island, characters like Long John the ship cook and Captain Flint will remain with you. They become lovable whether they are good or bad.

The book I read is a Penguin Classic and it contains an author’s note at the end where Stevenson shares his experience of writing Treasure Island. He admits he hadn’t bothered about fine writing and characterization as it was going to be a children’s book. Treasure Island was Stevenson’s first published book but certainly not his first attempt at writing a novel. He had tried writing novels before but had not been able to take anything to a satisfactory end.

The idea of Treasure Island had come to him from a map of an island he had made sitting in painter friend’s room. He started writing the chapters and the book started taking shape. Stevenson also confesses to having been inspired by several books that had been written before. From them he generously borrowed ideas, characters, changing their names and details to masquerade them. My Penguin edition produces a chapter from a book to which the character Captain Flint owes its origin.

Ever since I finished Treasure Island, I have been looking to read the book I had read as a kid and have almost forgotten - Robinson Crusoe.

How Calcutta Durga puja has changed

This time I saw Durga puja in Calutta for the first time since I left Calcutta eight years back. Durga puja has remained the same in spirit but a lot else has changed. Earlier pandals (make shift structures hosting the idol) resembled hastily put together relief camps; now they look like grand arty affairs. In fact, most attention of puja organizers now seems to center around aesthetics of pandals and idols, which, unlike in the past, are built based on various themes. Some of the puja pandals I visited were built based on lotus, universe and so on.

Except a very few pujas, organizing pujas has become an extremely costly affair. Earlier, puja organizers used to visit families residing within the sphere of a puja (almost all areas have their own pujas) and collect donation, anything from Rs. 10, 100 to 1000 and above. Your donation amount depended on your social standing and affordability and if you were too stingy the collectors would put soft pressure on you to part with a decent amount but nothing abnormally high.

Collecting donations from households has become a thing of yore. Pujas have become so big that minor household dole outs can’t accommodate their costs. Now pujas subsist on advertisement revenues collected from corporations. It’s not that corporations weren’t part of Durga puja earlier. But now their presence has become much bigger and they are the biggest funders of most pujas. So you have big banners and buntings surrounding all puja pandals (much more than before).

All these have increased the number of people going pandal hopping, unlike in the past when people coming from main Calcutta mostly used to stick to their area pujas with very minimal venture outs.

Street food is a significant part of puja and it has got substantially corporatized. For every five vendors who come from the unorganized sector, there are at least two to three who represent brands.

I think corporatization has happened for good reasons – because, if anything, it has injected a longer life and vigor into Durga puja by ensuring a stable stream of fund for it, without essentially changing the character of how Durga puja is celebrated or displacing anyone from the economic ecosystem of the puja (organized brands and individual vendors exist side by side). And as for emphasis on aesthetics and grandeur, any person familiar with Durga puja will tell you that it was always more about revelry and celebration of a culture and less about religiosity.

I arrived in Calcutta on Sashti and read the Telegraph, but a little towards the afternoon on Saptami, the next day, I realized I hadn’t read any paper at all. I asked my mother and came to know of another change – that there would be no paper during the four days of the puja.

The Moon and Sixpence - Somerset Maugham

Some have artistic talent. Fewer have artistic aspirations. Fewer take their aspirations seriously and pursue art alongside other professions. Fewer leave their professions to pursue art fulltime. And still fewer pursue art just for the sake of art, not for money or fame. Charles Strickland, a conventional stockbroker, left his family, in England, at 47, and went to Paris to become a painter. He never sold his paintings during his lifetime. After a few years in Paris, he went to Tahiti and after living for a few years there, he died. About seven years after his death, when his portraits were discovered by art agents and they yielded astronomical prices from art enthusiasts for their artistic brilliance, they woke up to Strickland’s genius and Strickland found fame.

The Moon and Sixpence was my second Somerset Maugham book and it shares a few things with the last Maugham book I read (Theatre, reviewed below). One is marriage is not a watertight compartment, but a porous relationship which often loses its integrity due to various factors preying on grey areas (discord or dissatisfaction either expressed or suppressed) that work under the surface of any relationship.

In Theatre, the advent of an accountant in the life a of married actress changes the complexion of the actress’s relationship with her husband. In The Moon and Sixpence, one day, Strickland’s wife finds a letter left behind by her husband telling her that there is nothing left between them anymore and that he is going to Paris, tossing her world upside down as until then theirs was a contented marriage and Strickland seemed unlikeliest of husbands to leave his wife. One losing its integrity  due to the advent of a foreigner, another due to presence of a unexpressed desire (to free oneself from the clutches of relationship which could restrict one from fully dedicating oneself to fulfill a desire).

The other attribute is, I think, part of Maugham’s style of framing his characters which also forms, according to me, his belief about human nature – that no man is monochromatic: we all have conflicting character traits; that we all have some redeeming qualities; that a tip is always a deceptive indicator of the size of the iceberg behind it. Also a part of Maugham’s style is making panoramic observations about human nature based on the actions of his characters and in such places as his plots warrant. The observations read well and form extremely quotable quotes. Maugham is a very quotable writer and his quotes mainly come from these sharp and insightful observations he makes.

Published in 1942, The Moon and Sixpence is loosely inspired from a great impressionist painter’s life, Paul Gauguin. The story is written in the first person with the author as narrator who traces Strickland’s life starting from a few years before Strickland left home and family to a few years after his death when Strickland had come to be known as a genius. But being just a social acquaintance of the painter, during these years the author had seen or known Strickland in bits and pieces making it difficult for his experience to throw up any concrete picture of the man, how he lived his life in Paris, what were the reasons behind his actions/behavior etc.

Maugham has had to bridge a lot of gaps in his knowledge of Strickland’s life to give the reader a concrete picture of the man whose behavior was often puzzling and differing with the author’s view of him. And his efforts notwithstanding, Maugham has admitted that he has not been able to present a coherent picture of Strickland’s personality. Maugham has summed up incidents and stitched together facts some known by him and some gathered from others whose paths crossed Strickland’s mainly when the painter stayed in Tahiti.

The Moon and Sixpence is about pursuit of art for art’s sake. During his lifetime, Strickland never sold his portraits. He saw women in his life as means of fulfilling his bodily needs avoiding the trappings of relationship so that he could completely devote himself to painting. Until his death, he achieved nothing of material value and lived the last years of his life in terrible penury (contracted leprosy) and in the last year of his life lost his eyesight. Each year he spent trying to be an artist materially pauperized him. Finally fame came to him seven years after his death.

While reading the book, I found Strickland’s dedication bizarre because of his indifference to success. Later I realized that what revolted against my belief is that for us dedication and success are part of the same package. One must lead to the other; the absence of one makes the other lose its vitality: without success dedication becomes pitiable and without dedication success seems unreliable. For Strickland, however, this relationship didn't exist; his dedication was a self-fulfilling component which didn't need to draw sustainance from success or hope of success.

The Moon and Sixpence doesn’t leave you long after you have left it, shut and put it down.

A Black Dog Evening

Whiskey is one of the most interesting things in the world. Each whiskey is different from another with its distinct characteristics, color, smell and feel. I vaguely knew some of these facts but didn’t know the technicalities that go into chiseling these traits and making a whiskey different from another. I woke up to these facts on Saturday, at Habanero, a Mexican restaurant, where Black Dog held a scotch-tasting event.

Black Dog has three blends (12 years, 18 years and 21 years ) and each one has its own characteristics and maturity. And at Black Dog Easy Evening, Mohit Nishchol the compare (and a liquor consultant) took us through the entire ritual of tasting and explained each characteristic of the variants.

Each part of the tasting ritual (sipping a peg, rolling it in your mouth and then quietly swallowing it letting the drink slowly make its way down your innards) is meant to reveal a particular aspect of the liquor’s personality – colour, aroma, palate and finish. These characteristics come from two factors, the region where a whiskey has been processed and the number of years it has been stored in a barrel.

Each blend of Black Dog is a collective of whiskeys coming from different regions of Scotland with their distinct regional characteristics (aroma, taste, flavor) and barreled for a particular period of time, giving each blend a completely different flavor and taste.

Black Dog 12 Years Old is a blend of whiskeys from Speyside, Islay, Highlands and Lowlands of Scotland, each matured for a minimum of 12 years which contribute to its colour, taste and flavor. After I sipped it, Mohit asked me for my reaction and I was lost for words. I felt it had a network of flavors, some working in the foreground and some lurking behind. I said it was robust and had a woody taste.

Mohit agreed and mentioned a few more streams of flavor and taste that Black Dog 12 Years is supposed to have, like fruitiness and vanillic sweetness. I tried to feel the taste again by rolling my sip in mouth and it did reveal some of these tastes in whiffs and bits.

Mohit informed each blend acquires its taste from the ingredients used to make it (which, in the case of Black Dog, are again dependent on which regions of Scotland the whiskies come from) and the barrel in which it is kept for maturing. The inner wood of the barrel constantly interacts with the liquor aging together with the liquor and giving the liquor its color and flavour which undergo changes (in tone and intensity) as years roll on. It’s just like a human relationship.

When I tossed back a sip of Black Dog 18 Years, it seemed to have a soft lingering effect on my tongue. Black Dog 18 Years owes it to the fact that it has been matured in oak casks and vats and is an outcome of aged malt and grain whiskies blended together. But what I found most pleasant about Black Dog is when you finally gulp the whiskey, even without diluting it with water or anything else, it goes down smoothly and pleasantly without the feeling of a fire ball rolling down your throat. This, according to me, is the attribute of a good whiskey.

As Mohit was taking us through the testing rituals, a blogger asked in interesting question: “Have these blends changed overtime to suit changing tastes and market priorities.”

In 1883, Walter Millard, a Scot staying in India, travelled to Scotland searching for a good whiskey and discovered a blend created by James Mackinlay, of the second generation of the Leith Scotch Whisky blending family. Being a keen angler himself, Walter Millard named the whisky Black Dog in honour of his favourite salmon fishing fly used in the Spey and Tay rivers of Scotland.

Mohit informed it’s been about 120 years since, and to this day, Black Dog has retained its original blend.

A regal-looking-oval bottle with intense color arrived at our table – Black Dog 21 Years old scotch. Mohit asked us to take a generous mouthful and hold it over and under the tongue – to unlock its traits. I did, and after that, I churned the whiskey in my mouth and left it for fraction of a second…and found the aftertaste too aromatic for my liking.

Partly that’s expected because Black Dog 21 is most mature of all the blends and is specially made and crafted to be rich and rare in experience, which it, of course, is. And it perfectly lives up to the awe it causes when you set your sight on its bottle and the special ingredients used to bring it to what it is.

Some of us truly liked it, but, for me, the lighter ones worked better. I discovered whether you enjoy a whiskey or not, it depends on your reaction (which is guided by your innate taste and temperament) to the drink, which varies from person to person.




Chicken Wings

  As drinks share a complex relationship with the barrel in which they are matured, they also have an equation with the food you savor your drinks with. And Habanero had arranged for a variety of Mexican food items to go with our drinks. Except a few, I liked all of them. But the one accompaniment I enjoyed the most with my drinks was dark nutty chocolates: they didn’t interfere with the taste of the drinks and complemented instead of dominating them.

Biography of Twitter

It’s surprising how far Twitter has come in a short period of time. I still remember joining Tweeter about a year and half ago and being greeted by some friends who were already on it. Since then a lot has happened. I have got new followers, added new people to the list of people I follow, been witness to changes and developments at a national and global level, read new articles and posted blogs. Some six or so months back a prominent journalist had tweeted if we are developing a Twitter fatigue. Well, I have not and I continue to find Twitter exciting.


It was launched in 2005 and took about two years to become popular. And although, when it started becoming popular, many called it an alternative to Facebook, Twitter was neither modeled on FB nor had been meant to rival it. FB was originally launched as a photo sharing app which eventually became a platform where you could do several other things around networking apart from photo sharing.

Twitter, on the other hand, was launched a networking site where you could only post short (140 letters) messages. Given the succinct nature of messages, it never became another FB-like site and established an alternate pattern of networking, less chatty and more impersonal, promoting, in sum, the kind of messages you wouldn't share with a friend or a family member but a person you shared an interest with. This is why Twitter became a platform to engage with others on issues of public interest, politics, social issues, films, books etc.

There are enough rabble rousers on Twitter but very few people who have no opinion or at least are not on a networking site to express them or review them based on others', the type FB mills with.

But does Twitter have an impact? Last week, the India govt blocked the Twitter accounts of some journalists and social commentators because they had attacked the government. A couple of days later, however, their Twitter accounts were unblocked again. Nothing can establish Twitter’s power better than this flip flop by the govt. First, fearing that a few Tweets might cause a fire, you block an account; then realizing that blocking will lead to a backlash both on and offline helping the blocked person to become the face of opposition, you unblock his account again.

This kind of incident is not new to Twitter. While I have been on Twitter, the site has faced threats and demands from various governments and heads of states (China being one of them and very frequently so) demanding that Twitter content be sanitized, dissenters blocked, etc. Although Twitter resisted the demands to block sites or give sanitized content initially, eventually it gave into the coercion, promising to sanitize content based on regional preferences/threats.

You can’t blame Twitter for this because the networking site may be one without national boundaries but its servers are vulnerable to being blocked by national governments and their cyber security apparatus. There are ways to circumvent even that but lack of easy access to the site will still shoo away some users from the site.

Twitter is not the only networking site that has suffered this fate and no networking site can avoid this for too long. And, if you were not a starry-eyed idealist, you would realize that toning down content is more preferable to being blocked. However, this whole cycle of people expressing their dissenting views and governments asking networking sites to block them or remove dissenting content and the networking sites resisting the demands – is not a futile affair.

The bad press governments receive each time they try to curtail networking sites’ freedom will eventually make them hesitant about attacking networking sites and push their boundary of tolerance a little further . And each time a new fight between governments and dissenters breaks out, it will be fought from a point where the boundaries had been laid last time, making each clash a step towards a more tolerant world. That’s the role Twitter has played since its birth together with other networking sites.

Theatre by Somerset Maugham

Good actors are difficult to understand because they can fake their emotions so easily. And after recently finishing reading Theatre by Somerset Maugham, I have very few doubts about it. Julia Lambart is the best stage actress of England and has a somewhat happy family life with a husband and a son. But the family tranquil starts coming apart as she falls for a clerk, who works in her husband’s theatre company, and is two decades younger than her. The affair continues for some time, her lover finds access to the world of celebrities through Julia and Julia, now in her 50s, rediscovers her youth and starts visiting places (night clubs) where she had never been seen and, as is common with such affairs, tongues start wagging. (What is Julia Lambart doing with this young nothing?) Reputation matters for show business people and the rumour mills shake Julia a little and Julia tries to move away from her lover only to return to him again.


However, meanwhile, her young lover has met a beautiful upcoming actress and has fallen for her. He has also promised the newbie a role in Julia’s husband’s home production. Julia can easily deny her the opportunity but lest her lover thinks she is jealous of the upcoming actress having lost her lover to her Julia arranges for her to get a role.

It’s a dream come true for a struggling actress to find a role in a play which casts Julia Lambart; but, alas, for Julia’s romantic competitor, the play turns out to be a disaster as Julia, using her stage prowess, undermines her performance slaying her career without even anybody noticing Julia’s sinister thespian moves. Expect her husband, who being oblivious to Julia’s cuckolding, fails to understand why Julia would try to destroy the newbie’s performance, having helped her get the role in the first place. When he confronts Julia with his discovery, Julia, again by her sleight of hands, deceives her husband into believing that she destroyed the young actress’s performance to avenge the fact she had tried to seduce her husband. And the husband takes it as a compliment for his looks and believes it remaining oblivious to the real reason - that Julia had exacted revenge because the actress had seduced her young lover.

This was my first Somerset Maugham book and having read many writers write about Maugham reverentially, I partly knew what to expect and wasn’t disappointed. Maugham is a breezy story teller and holds you tight till the end and although he produced a commendable body of work, he never found enough literary acclaim. Maugham is read to this day but not bracketed with the likes of DH Lawrence and EM Foster who roughly came from the same period. Commenting on the puritanical attitude of literary snobs, Maugham had one said you can’t write just for the pleasure of telling a story. However, Maugham has inspired two three, generations of writers and it’s from some of their books that I first came to know about Maugham.

Characterization

The characters are all human with their limitations and virtues, all trying to do the best they can within them, none is one-dimensional. Various situations bring out various sides of their personalities.

Julia Lambart is brilliant but she is self centered, an artist who attributes all her human shortcomings in some way or the other to her artistic abilities. She manipulates people around her and situations to her favour and generally has her way. Her husband is a good husband but is too believing of Julia. He is stingy but his theatre employees overlook that as he is also very courteous. He is unimaginative but that helps him to be disciplined and makes him a good manager. He is good looking and vain and can be easily won over if praised about looks. Julia’s son is growing up and developing his views on things around him and with a father busy trying to be the most attractive man in England and mother wrapped up in her acting career, he feels lonely and ignored. And so on…

The story is set in the pre Second World War period when cinema had still not overshadowed theatre and the celebrity of stage actors could be just as big as the screen ones. The novel’s central character Julia, for example, was the most famous of stage actresses of her time in England but she had limited success on screen.

Chinese Cottage and Chinese in India

“The specialty of Chinese food lies in its blandness. If you put too much spice it kills the authenticity. Any Chinese restaurant you visit in Bangalore the food is spicier than Chinese food is supposed to be.”


I was sitting at a Chinese restaurant which promises to serve Chinese food Tangra style, a Chinese food hub in Calcutta which is host to many small to medium size Chinese restaurants owned by Chinese people most of whom originally owned tanneries until a few years ago (foot wear and other leather products made by Chinese people are very popular in Calcutta) which had to be closed down following a state government edict forcing the Chinese owners into different occupations, food being one of them.

However, there are other Chinese food hubs in Calcutta and, according to Anthony, the one on Poddar Court Lane is the best and the oldest. Poddar Court lane is where Anthony grew up in and in later years, after doing a hotel management and failing to find any satisfactory job in Calcutta, he moved to Bangalore. His initial years in Bangalore were tough. He worked in various small to medium size Chinese hotels with Indian owners. Being a Chinese food puritan, Anthony was unhappy with the general approach towards making Chinese food in Bangalore.

Opening his own hotel was nowhere in sight in early years as Anthony was mostly busy with his day to day existence. His marriage changed that. Anthony got married to his childhood sweetheart from Calcutta and a few months after marriage his wife joined him in Bangalore and started to work. After a few years, they felt together if they saved money from their income they would be able to open a restaurant of their own. About seven to eight years of hard work, saving and a bit of loan from friends and bank led to Chinese Cottage.

Antony said the focus of Chinese Cottage is authenticity. (He told this when I was chewing my way through Chinese Chopsuey. Chinese Chopsuey was not the correct dish to check the verity of Anthony’s claim as all Chinese restaurants make it bland and have its spicier versions separately on menu card. I am a conservative food enthusiast who tries out different joints but sticks to familiar dishes. ) Blaming the Bangalore Chinese taste orientation, Anthony said, “You have to eat chilly chicken to understand what I am saying. Chilly chicken is supposed to be so bland as to be perfect for a 16 year old kid. Here it’s opposite.”

Chinese Cottage (located opposite Koramangla Club) is quite sparse with very few people on its staff and Anthony is involved in everything in a hands-on way, expect cooking. He makes sure to explain an unfamiliar dish to you, so you make an informed choice.

What brought Anthony to Bangalore? “Calcutta has become inhospitable to its Chinese population. They are approached by local bullies for huge donations for Durga and other pujas. Not having access to any power base, Chinese people don’t have anybody to turn to. Despite being into its third or fourth generation, they are treated like foreigners. Some of them don’t have any legal documents to establish their citizenship. When they try for passport, papers establishing their ancestry are asked for which are very difficult to furnish now, almost a 100 years after their ancestors came to India.

Their ancestors had been taken captive by British forces during the First World War and sent to Rajasthan whence they came to Calcutta. But why Calcutta of all places which is anyway quite far from Rajasthan? Anthony said maybe their group leader went to Calcutta first and the rest followed. In later years, the descendants of the Chinese group which came to Calcutta went on to make Calcutta the city with the highest Chinese population in India. However, this population is gradually shrinking because over the years many have moved to the US, Singapore and some to China.

While Anthony was talking to me, a bespectacled kid was running up and down the restaurant, the restaurant being quite empty at this hour, early evening. Anthony said he was his son. He was born in Bangalore and has never been to Calcutta.