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As the year draws to a close, I look back to see which blog posts received the most views from you, my readers. I hope you enjoyed and found value in what you read. And, in case you haven’t had a chance to read a few of these posts, here’s a list. And for everything else, there’s our All page. LITTLE LEGACIES The past is a strange thing. It can never be relived even though we often carry it with us. We’ve all been down paths of nostalgia remembering with fondness even that which had, in the past, felt like tough times. And then, there are pieces of the past we visit every day without giving them much thought. For instance, you may tie the laces of your left shoe before the right because a kindergarten classmate told you that it was lucky. Now, decades later, you continue to do so subconsciously. WHY RATAN TATA'S PASSING FEELS LIKE A PERSONAL LOSS I never met Mr Ratan Tata. Nor have I ever worked for a Tata-owned organisation. Yet, his passing left me in tears. It felt like we’ve been robbed of something very precious. I spoke to a longtime friend, Smriti last night. She said that she’d been poring over videos of Mr Tata’s funeral and articles chronicling his life since she heard the news. She wondered if being so affected by the death of someone who is technically a stranger made her a ‘freak’. I told her I felt the same way. To this she said, “I’m so glad I’m not a freak. Or that we are freaks together.” SEEKING SYNCHRONICITY In January 2013, I visited Chennai on a professional assignment with a few team members. One day, we had the morning to ourselves. A colleague asked me to accompany him to buy a saree for his wife. Amongst the ones we saw was a muted gold silk saree with a rhomboid weave of golden and silver thread. My colleague considered purchasing it but eventually preferred another. That night, I spoke to a friend who told me about a dream he had the preceding night. He lived in the US and so his night was my day. He’d dreamt of walls covered in wallpaper made of silk. And it was the colour of muted gold, covered in rhombi. Taken aback, I told him about having seen a saree that morning, very similar to what he described. We laughed it off but the incident has stayed with me. Over the years, I wondered if it had been a synchronicit y BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS TO OVERCOME A READING SLUMP From my extensive experience of such slumps, I know that one of the important elements of achieving the requisite momentum to get out of a reading slump is to pick the right book . Something that is fast-paced or soothing (depending on what you need) but mostly, something that reads like a letter from an old friend… easy-going, fun and with bits that make you chuckle or sit up in surprise. THE MYTH OF MULTI-TASKING It costs us our ability to focus, our concentration and perhaps most importantly, our time. Time is irreplaceable even if you were willing to pay for it. Think about it. Something you think is practically free i.e. internet access, robs you of a thing so valuable that, once lost, even the richest person on the planet can’t buy back—Time. Add to that, another precious commodity, Focus. And yet, you think it costs you nothing. This is perhaps the greatest mind trick of our times – a kind of mass hypnosis.   Confession: I’m guilty of unlocking and scrolling through some or the other app even when I can see that I have no notifications whatsoever. Not even the non-urgent kind. This is pathetic behaviour but I know I’m not alone in this dome of dopamine-addiction.   ON FRIENDSHIP Who is a friend? Most of us refer to all manner of people as our ‘friends’. Everyone, from a long-lost schoolmate to a colleague you get coffee with and the guy at the local squash court, is a ‘friend’. And of course, there is that ubiquitous and odd breed called the Facebook friend.   Distinguishing between relationships takes time and effort, and could result in a most unsettling finding - that one does not have many friends and worse still, that one is not a true friend, even to a few. ALL QUIET ON THE WAR FRONT: QUIET QUITTING, QUIET FIRING & QUIET HIRING This is a story about a great plague and how it brought the battle between workers and employers to a head. Every few months, a fresh salvo is fired. And because we live in the times of the mighty hashtag, each of these barrages has a catchy caption. It all began with a little virus in early 2020.   Thousands of people realised that they were working jobs that weren’t doing anything for them, and they would much rather use the pandemic to study and change tracks. Or at least, resign from jobs that they’d been at for years just because they were stuck in a toxic comfort zone. I suppose you could say the pandemic jolted them out of their inertia. That’s what led to the Great Resignation which became something of a movement in 2021. COMFORT TV SHOWS THAT HELP ME UNWIND A long day calls for some couch therapy! This is my list of Comfort TV shows which never fail to soothe.   Comfort TV can be a series, show, sport, or anything you like watching after a long day, looking to unwind before bed. I’ll go first. ONE COFFEE, PLEASE. AND A PORTION OF PEOPLE-WATCHING The barista called out the name scrawled on the venti cup, “Cappuccino for Aditya.” I smiled, a gentle wave of satisfaction washing over me. That was close enough, I thought to myself. My guess had been Abhishek, Abhimanyu or some other common male name starting with the letter A. Sorry for the abrupt   opening. Let me start at the beginning. THE ALLURE OF SIMPLICITY Simplicity has a ring of truth about it, an elegance and resilience that beats trends and momentary peaks and troughs. If you’ve ever seen a belt of sand dunes, you know what I mean. Functionally, it’s just piles of sand shaped into crescents by the wind and yet, one can keep looking at them, mesmerised.   Perhaps, this applies to our lives as well. Yes, we live in consumerist times and there are unending mounds of stuff everywhere we look. And yet, the call of the classic and understated is eternal and cuts through the clutter. WORKPLACE TIPS: WHAT THEY DON'T TEACH IN SCHOOL Chronic stress, mental health issues  and other indicators of ill-health have become too common amongst corporate employees to warrant comment nowadays and yet, the ruinous effects of work stress multiply silently, till a case like Anna Sebastian Perayil’s hits the headlines, rousing us all.   So, what’s the solution? Well, the answer lies within the person reading this post – you. You need to make the choice about how you want to work and live. THE CHARM OF WHIMSY Every now and then, burrowed into the prosaic paths of the commonplace is nestled something whimsical. Amazing and amusing in its quaintness and imagination, it makes us smile and adds a sparkle to the humdrumness of everyday life. I’m very easily charmed by whimsy – a quaint café, an interesting bookmark or a delightful hobby or trait is all it takes. And thus, we conclude the list of the most popular blog posts of the year on Tamed by the Fox. Do leave us a comment on which one was your favourite. Have a great 2025!

Today, the 15th of September, marks fifteen years since Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy, sending cataclysmic shockwaves across the world, eventually cracking open the global economy. It wasn’t the first financial institution to bite the dust that year, nor was it the last, but it was the one that forced everyone (even the ostriches in suits that roam political corridors) to finally admit that something was irreparably broken in the system. We may never know the full extent of the jobs lost, homelessness caused and lives changed irretrievably by the Global Financial Crisis of 2008. 8.8 million (88 lakh) jobs lost in the United States of America, 1.3 million (13 lakh) pink slips handed out in the United Kingdom and half a million (5 lakh) job cuts in India in just three months at the end of 2008 (that number only grew in 2009 and 2010). All this misery and very few people seemed interested in understanding what caused it all. I'm aware that statistics make eyes glaze over. That part is understandable because statistics are, indeed, rather dull. However, this disinterest extends to the issue at large. Why is that? Is it because it didn't affect them directly? I'm not sure that's the whole story, because I've known people who lost their jobs as a result of the 2008 Recession and still haven't bothered to understand what happened. Maybe, it's the desire to distance ourselves from bad news. Most likely, the boring and somewhat intimidating financial jargon associated with it kept most of us at arm's length. Either way, we played straight into the hands of head honchos at big finance firms who paid themselves billion-dollar bonuses even as this humongous fraud was still unfolding, lobbyists who get paid millions to get laws tailored to suit their clients at the aforementioned firms and politicians who accepted the riches and 'favours' that came their way as a reward for abandoning the interests of the folks who voted them into power. Let me state, right at the get go, that I didn't lose my job during the 2008-09 Recession. I did, however, watch many colleagues being fired in the middle of the work day and being escorted off the premises. It was humiliating to even watch. What made it worse was knowing that the people sacked were paying for crimes committed halfway across the globe by people who would be bailed out by the tax dollars of the very people they had defrauded. I was thoroughly confused by all of it. So, over the years, I read articles, watched documentaries like Inside Job and The Untouchables and films like The Big Short to understand what really happened and how it came to affect us all. The best way I can explain what caused the 2008 Recession given the limits of both my knowledge and your patience, is to say that it was a consequence of good old-fashioned greed, an erosion of common-sense checks and balances and a system where a lack of integrity paves the path to prosperity. Spoiler alert! Fifteen years later, that system remains mostly unchanged. LOANS GALORE The crisis, like charity, began at home or more accurately, with home mortgages, which is another term for loans where the purchased property serves as collateral. These are also referred to as secured loans. In other words, if you failed to make your mortgage payments, the bank that loaned you the money would gain ownership of the house. This house would then be sold to someone else to recover the loan. This, however, is not Plan A for the bank. Bankers’ dreams are made up of giving loans to individuals who will pay them back, with interest and on time. And since, bankers can't figure out a person's credit-worthiness just by looking at them, they are supposed to conduct checks into an applicant’s ability to pay back the loan before handing it out. Makes sense, right? Well, that's not what happened. THE HOUSING BUBBLE In the early 2000s, interest rates on loans in the United States were low and housing prices started to rise. This made buying a house a great investment opportunity. Banks started disbursing loans to just about anyone who wanted to buy a house in the booming housing market. Take the case of a woman who worked as an exotic dancer, presumably making all her money in cash. She held mortgages on five houses. Yes, you read it right. Five houses! And no, she didn't make that much, just in case you are considering a change of profession! The sober reality is that the bank's due diligence into her ability to pay back those loans was as good as absent. She wasn't the exception either, thanks to one of the protagonists of this story, sub-prime mortgages. SUB-PRIME MORTGAGES A sub-prime mortgage is a type of loan granted to people with poor credit scores, who, as a result of their bad credit histories, don't qualify for conventional mortgages. These loans typically cover 100% of the cost of the house, have higher interest rates and are available without too much pesky paperwork. The relaxing of credit lending standards by banks led to the bloating of sub-prime mortgages from less than 10% of all loans until 2004 to almost 20% in 2006. Let that sink in. Imagine if instead of there being the occasional rotten egg in a dozen, you were running the risk of finding two in every dozen. You’d change the store you were buying from, wouldn’t you? Not these guys. It wasn't as if sub-prime loans just became less risky out of the blue. Wall Street just accepted this higher risk because it gave them with an opportunity to cash in on the housing boom. To be fair, at this point, nobody was complaining. These sub-prime loans allowed customers with bad credit histories to participate in a booming housing sector, bankers to be rewarded for bringing their banks more business and for investment bankers to get rich selling financial instruments that bet on these loans. It was Christmas all year round. For a while. WHAT ARE MORTGAGE-BACKED SECURITIES? All this lending led to millions upon millions of sub-prime loans being accumulated by banks. This raises the question - why were these banks not concerned about the potential losses, incurred by these sub-prime loans, affecting their bottom-line? The reason for their apathy was that they had already sold this debt to other financial institutions like investment banks and hedge funds. So, it wasn’t their problem any longer. The buyers of this debt, the investment banks, clubbed thousands of these loans into something called mortgage-backed securities (MBS). These securities would then be sold to corporate investors and the general public. Till 2007-8, housing MBS were considered safe investments because conventional wisdom dictated that people always pay their mortgages. Except in this case, conventional wisdom turned out to be more conventional and less wisdom. POP GOES THE HOUSING BUBBLE The difference this time around was that the real estate market was booming and people were buying houses not just to live in, but as investments. When the housing bubble burst in 2006 and housing prices began their downward slide, the houses that were supposed to make their buyers a quick buck, were fast turning into a losing proposition. Picture this. You buy a house for 80 lakh (with the bank lending you 100% of the amount required) and around the time that you've paid off only a small portion of the loan (say, about 10 lakh), the price of the house falls to 60 lakh. What would you do? Would you stop paying back the loan to cut your losses? Of course, you would lose the ten lakh you'd already paid, but at least you wouldn't be stuck with a rapidly depreciating asset that you never intended living in anyway. And of course, there was also the danger of prices plummeting even lower. While I don’t know what you, my reader would have done, data shows that thousands and thousands of people did renege on their mortgage payments. Consequently, the default rate on mortgage loans surged and led to the failure of mortgage-backed securities. Remember, the viability of mortgage-backed securities depended on people paying back their loans as planned. The unsinkable Titanic had struck an iceberg. THE ROLE OF THE RATING AGENCIES Now, let's focus on why everyone was sold on these mortgage-backed securities. One reason, of course, was the popular belief that people always pay their mortgages, which made betting on them seem like a no-brainer. And this belief was not some folksy truism. It was backed by the world's top rating agencies. All MBS were graded by rating agencies like Moody's, Standard & Poor's and Fitch. The ratings go from AAA , which is the best, through AA, A, BBB, BB all the way down to B. The highest-rated securities (AAA) are considered the safest investments because they are a collection of mortgages that are most likely to be paid back. There were, however, many tranches of debt that were rated too low to be attractive to investors. Not that that posed much of a hurdle for the high priests at Morgan Stanley, Bank of America and their ilk. They simply bundled even larger numbers of these 'too bad to sell' sub-prime mortgages into new financial instruments called Collateralized Debt Obligation (CDOs), declared them "diversified" and sold those instead. Who says there is no imagination in banking? These guys were making stuff up as they went along! Of course, how these sparkly new CDOs, brimming with bottom-rated, high-risk mortgages, obtained favourable ratings this time around is a question for the venerable folks at the rating agencies. Though I must say that it's just fascinating to note how benevolent these agencies are to the financial entities that write them fat cheques! Common sense, if it walked the streets of the financial districts of New York and London, would have spotted a blatant conflict of interest in the incestuous nature of this arrangement. Unfortunately, that didn't happen (still hasn't) and so the gravy train rolled on, heading straight for a catastrophic derailment. THE FRAGILITY OF INSURANCE AGAINST DEFAULT As the rave reviews for these MBS and CDOs poured in, even famously stodgy organisations were tempted into investing their employee pension funds into them. Part of what assured them to take the risk was a financial tool called Credit Default Swaps (CDS). Credit Default Swaps protect bondholders and lenders against the risk of the borrower defaulting. The lender's insurance partner takes on this risk in return for payments, which are similar to insurance premiums. American Insurance Group (AIG) was one such lending partner. Understandably, these staid institutions felt as reassured as you do while driving your car around town, having paid the insurance premium, safe in the knowledge that you're covered even if you get into an accident. After all, nobody ever expects the insurer to run out of money. THE FALL OF LEHMAN BROTHERS As the number of home-owners defaulting on their mortgages swelled to unimaginable levels, the inherent hollowness of all these concepts was exposed. One of the biggest casualties of the 2008 carnage was Lehman Brothers , an investment bank which owed more than $600 billion in debt, of which $400 billion was covered by Credit Default Swaps. However, even before they could heave a sigh of relief for having had the good sense to insure their debt, they found that the bank’s insurer, AIG, lacked sufficient funds to cover their losses. So much for insurance! Lehman Brothers was far from an isolated case. The collapse was wide-spread and every large financial institution was affected in one way or another. This was a classic example of a short-sighted idea built on a bubble, floating on a seemingly solid but intrinsically-flawed concept. The logic of insurance in the form of CDS only holds water if one or two securities fail. In that case, the insuring parties would've had enough money to cover the losses of the insured. One can only assume that having to withstand the tsunami caused by the bursting of the housing bubble, compounded by the sub-prime crisis resulting in the 2008 Recession was not something anyone had even imagined. Quite like the time when there weren't enough lifeboats on the Titanic. I suppose it had been unfathomable to the builders and owners of the ship that lifeboats might be needed someday. Anyway, since the markets don't confine themselves to the limits of human imagination, housing prices fell more than 30%. This was a steeper price plunge than what was witnessed during the Great Depression. Panic selling was at its peak. The unsinkable Titanic had hit an iceberg, split into half and the only way to go now, was down. TAX DOLLARS TO THE RESCUE Eventually, the Federal Reserve of the United States intervened. The Treasury disbursed $439 billion to the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). The TARP funds helped a few key areas - banks, auto companies, credit markets and modifying mortgages. The Fed's bailout of AIG alone cost $182 billion. Across the world, billions had to be spent in the form of stimulus packages to restart national economies. All this, from the taxes paid by the average Joe to bail out firms who pride themselves on hiring only "the best and the brightest". JUST DESSERTS FOR ONE, PLEASE! While we could point fingers till the cows come home, the question that asks itself is – how many individuals found themselves charged with aiding and abetting this global meltdown? How many fat cat mortgage bankers (who handed out sub-prime loans like candy on Halloween and then made tidy little profits by selling the debt to investment bankers), CEOs of gargantuan investment banks (who injected this garbage into the economy while they enjoyed the rarefied air reserved for the top 1%) or bosses of credit rating agencies (which labelled absolute scrap as the crème de la crème of investments for a cushy payday) saw the inside of a jail cell? One. Yup, that's right. The esteemed law enforcement agencies of the United States managed to zero in on this one guy as the perpetrator of this multi-trillion-dollar scam. Who is this super-villain, you ask? Kareem Serageldin , an executive at Credit Suisse, whose crime was approving the concealment of hundreds of millions in losses in Credit Suisse's MBS portfolio. I agree, it sounds bad. It was wrong. He was complicit in some serious wrongdoing and deserved to pay the price. He did. Thirty months in jail. ARE THE RICH AND CONNECTED IMMUNE TO THE LAW? Now, let's zoom out a wee bit and look at the bigger picture. This guy, Serageldin, was not even part of the second tier at a second-tier financial institution. Talk about small potatoes! And he was the only person prosecuted for a scam that spanned across major financial institutions like Merrill Lynch, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, AIG and Lehman Brothers to name a few. Nope, no guilty parties there, sir. It’s anyone’s guess whether they were all innocent or happened to have friends in high places. Why wouldn't they? Many top Wall Street executives have served in various US administrations before and after their time at Wall Street. I'm not sure if there is honour among thieves but there certainly seems to be loyalty. And maybe, the fact that many of the wealthiest 1% contribute as generously as they do to the election campaigns of both Democratic and Republican candidates might have something to do with this stroke of luck. I doubt if there is a more apt explanation for the lack of legal action against the worst offenders in the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 than that offered by economist Nouriel Roubini, in the documentary Inside Job . When asked why there have been no real investigations into the matter, Roubini replied, "Because then you'd find the culprits". Add to this what Dick Durbin, the Senate's second-highest ranking Democrat at the time, was honest enough to admit about the US Congress. He said that the banks "frankly own the place". THE SWILL ABOUT POLITICAL WILL January 2009 was a time of audacious hope. President Obama had just stepped into the White House and there was much talk about how the full force of the law would be made to bear down on Wall Street and its corrupt practices. The likes of Attorney General Eric Holder and the head of the Criminal Division at the Department of Justice, Lanny Breuer were tasked with the job. Months and then years passed, and nothing of note happened. Except, of course, the prosecution of the one and only, Kareem Serageldin. Why didn't they prosecute the bigger players in this unprecedented financial crisis? The PBS Frontline documentary, The Untouchables places part of the responsibility on Eric Holder for being overly concerned with "collateral damage in the form of bad press and political fallout". The consequence of his excessive caution was that the administration ended up pushing for cash settlements over proper criminal procedure. Breuer, on the other hand, was clearly jousting with some deep legal issues like believing that the actions of Wall Street were not criminal. How someone who holds a law degree and works for the Department of Justice doesn't believe fraud to be a criminal act is frankly beyond ridiculous! This is the same Lanny Breuer on whose watch, a few years down the line, another banking goliath, HSBC faced no criminal prosecution for laundering funds for designated terrorist groups and drug networks. His logic, in that instance, was that prosecuting or taking away HSBC's banking license would cost too many jobs. Maybe he thought terrorist acts and drug trafficking don’t incur any damage. What a beacon of empathy and legal luminescence Mr Breuer is! THE PENALTY THAT NEVER WAS In the end, it all came down to a friendly slap on the wrists of the financial giants that caused and survived the debacle of '08. Till 2015, 49 financial institutions had paid various government entities and private plaintiffs nearly $190 billion in fines and settlements, according to an analysis by the investment bank Keefe, Bruyette & Woods. Are fines of less than $200 billion fair reparation for losses that ran into trillions? And even that pale shadow of a penalty came from the pockets of shareholders, not the bankers themselves because the settlements were levied on corporations, not specific employees, and hence, paid out as corporate expenses. In some cases, these amounts were even deductible from taxes. Just like payments made to charity! And in case you thought that the whole exercise had taught the swindlers of Wall Street a little something about corporate accountability and responsibility, well, I applaud your optimism. What happened instead was that, in early 2014, just weeks after Jamie Dimon , the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, settled out of court with the Justice Department, the bank’s board of directors gave him a 74% raise, bringing his total compensation to $20 million. What can I say? Life can be so unfair! RECESSION 2008 : IN CONCLUSION So, that's the way things panned out. It boiled down to the sad fact that individuals and institutions seldom do the right thing if doing the wrong thing brings them a lot more money or power, with little or no risk of retribution. I doubt if any lessons have been learnt at the level of financial institutions and governments. I, however, did learn a few lessons from the 2008 Global Financial Crisis and the recession that followed. Though that's a post for another day.

As a child, I wore a fair number of sweater sets knitted by my mother to match with most of my clothes. I loved watching her knit. The pattern books were enigmas with their codes like p2tog, k4 and yo. To my five-year-old self, it seemed like stuff I would never understand. On a winter day a few years later, when I was around 10 or 11, I asked my mother to lend me some of her leftover wool and a pair of needles. I was given a small ball of mouse-brown thin yarn with size 12 needles and Mom taught me two stitches – knit and purl. A star stitch scarf from year two or three of Project Knit! I like you and so, I’ll spare you the unabridged account of my miserable first attempt at knitting that winter, except to say that the stitches were usually being taken off the needle and unravelled into their original form more than anything else. I was a pathetic knitter. What’s worse, I was persistent. Over the next four or five years that small ball of yarn went from mousy brown and thin to mousier greyish-brown and thinner thanks to my repeated attempts at knitting something. I wasn’t ambitious enough to decide in advance what I was knitting. Instead, I intended to accept graciously whatever chose to reveal itself! By the end of it, that blighted ball of wool had seen more steam (to straighten out kinks) than most saunas! Then some ten or twelve years ago, I decided to try my hand at it again. With the non-judgmental support of YouTube. It was a crisp winter in Delhi and my mother was in town, on her annual visit. I’m sure she was less enthused than I was by my renewed interest in knitting. This time I was a lot more decisive in my plans. I would knit a scarf. After all, even I couldn’t mess that up. So, I thought. I picked a pattern, jotted it down on paper for reference, bought three skeins of midnight blue yarn, a few knitting needles and off I went. It wasn’t a smooth journey. I dislike making mistakes and had chosen a pattern where a mistake would be visible even to an untrained eye. In what was not a surprise to anyone with a grasp of the inevitable, much ripping and restarting ensued. Eventually, I had a muffler to show for it. I promptly gifted it to a friend who appeared, by all accounts, to be pleased with it. And so, almost every winter I pick out a new pattern and knit a scarf. I suppose you could say that knitting is on a seasonal repeat for me like the repeat rows in all knitting patterns. There are howls of frustration when I make a mistake, followed by attempts to rectify the error. If that fails, I head to my mother (if she’s in town), a much better knitter, to help rescue the situation. When that fails too, I always choose to rip the scarf than overlook a dropped stitch or a mismatched design. Knitting, for me, is about focussing enough on something constructive so as to reach a mindful state. Like when you’re meditating, focusing on your breath or the sounds outside the window - be it the whistling wind, the patter of rain or even the dull buzz of traffic in the distance. Before you realise it, your mind rises above the thing you’re concentrating on, to a cloud of just being at peace with what you’re doing. That’s why I knit. I can't phrase it better than Elizabeth Zimmerman, the British-born knitting teacher and designer who revolutionized the modern practice of knitting through her books. She said, “Properly practised, knitting soothes the troubled spirit, and it doesn’t hurt the untroubled spirit either.” The repetitive actions that are part of any handicraft bring about an atmosphere of mindfulness and calm. Everything else is a happy by-product. Whether that be the fact that I can challenge myself, little by little, by trying a slightly more complex pattern each time or that I can gift friends and family a hand-made gift which makes up in charm and warmth what it may lack in finesse. The diagonal lace stitch is not for the faint-hearted beginner! It’s rewarding to create something that you can hold in your hands. We live in a world where many beautiful things have been subsumed into the ether as bits and bytes - letters written on airmail have become emails, books are on kindle and music that used to be on mixed tapes is now part of Spotify playlists. Knitting, pottery or embroidery feel almost anachronistic nowadays. Perhaps, that’s makes them so therapeutic . It's a truism that there is no luxury greater than having something custom-made for you. I would add to that. Custom-made with love is the kind of luxury that isn’t available in stores, making it something to be cherished. And so, I knit.

Whether it is one’s life or the story of everything that has ever happened, to fully appreciate a portion of it, one needs to have at least a broad idea of the whole. It’s like the American astronomer, educator and creator of the television show Cosmos, Carl Sagan said, “To make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.” Origin Story by David Christian is a panoramic look at the unfolding of the universe since its birth – the explosive expansion of space, the formation of stars and planets, the birth of the Earth’s atmosphere and continents, the first sparks of life which took billions of years to grow into dinosaurs, the evolution of our species, hunters and foragers turning to farming, the industrial revolution all the way to where science and innovation have brought us today. This book, as a sample of the field of study that is increasingly being referred to as Big History, shows us what a long way we’ve travelled and how, regardless of all our perceived differences as creatures that live on this pale blue dot, we have a common origin story. A tale with enough plot twists, catastrophes and serendipitous links to make one sit up in wonder at the unlikelihood of our very existence on this planet. How did it all come to be? And why did no other animal or being achieve what we, as Homo Sapiens, have? And which bends in the river led us to our current position at the top of the food chain and a dominating force in the biosphere? Reading this book evokes a sense of wonder at the ties we all share with our ancestors who may have sat around a bonfire and gazed at a different night sky thousands of years ago and pondered the eternal questions – Who are we? Where do we come from? To seek those answers is part of what it means to be human. It is the reason we made up our myths and legends, why all religions have some version of the creation story and why the picture of a Black Hole’s Event Horizon was a top trend on the internet. You could say we are hard-wired to wonder. Given the expanse of time that Origin Story sets out to explore, it is helpful that David Christian breaks up the timeline into blocks referred to as thresholds, depicting how some very complex and significant things appeared at key transition points. The thresholds give shape to the complicated and mammoth narrative of the modern origin story. Highlighting major turning points, when things that existed at the time were rearranged or otherwise altered to create something new helps us see the causal relationship between these thresholds or key events. This makes it easier to grasp the links between seemingly unrelated and chronologically distant events. Apart from a couple of chapters which I found crammed with too much detail about trilobites, for instance, Origin Story is an engaging read. It also places issues like climate change in perspective. As I understood it, our planet has seen much worse times and will survive and course-correct. What we need to think about is whether or not we, as a species, will survive? There are examples galore of species that didn’t survive ice ages and varying levels of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. That’s the thing about Nature. While we may allude to its mother-like qualities, it would be wise to remember that Nature is a very impartial mother with no special concern for us and that in the grand scheme of things, our species’ survival is of little or no consequence to anyone other than ourselves. The way that we are different from any other species on Earth is that we can consciously choose to make a difference to our environment. If you’re curious about our place in the universe and fascinated by stuff like how elements created in star nurseries billions of years ago ended up in our bones, Origin Story is right up your alley. I found it interesting and informative. You might too.

A Slow Fire Burning  is true to its name. It’s a slow burn mystery built around a pernicious fire of resentment and pain. This is Paula Hawkins’ third novel in the thriller genre following Into the Water (2017)   and her smash-hit debut psychological thriller, The Girl on the Train  (2015) which was also adapted into a film starring Emily Blunt. Akin to The Girl on the Train , this novel too has a host of complex and broken characters. The primary thrust of the story is the search for the murderer of Daniel Sutherland, a 23-year-old man stabbed to death on a houseboat. The cast of suspects include: Laura Kilbride, a troubled 20-year-old girl who spent the preceding night with the victim; Miriam Lewis, a nosy, middle-aged loner who lives on a houseboat moored close to the victim’s; the young man’s aunt, Carla Myerson; and Daniel's uncle, Theo Myerson who appears to have his own secrets. Hawkins tosses in the additional element of the accidental death of the victim’s lonely alcoholic mother, Angela, just two months before his own. It will have you pondering connections between the two deaths and whether they could be related. I found the opening of the novel is a bit bumpy with a new POV character being introduced in each of the initial three chapters without giving the reader any real sense of who they are. If Paula Hawkins was looking to create an air of dissonance and confusion, she succeeded. Stylistically, this is a story with multiple POV characters (Miriam, Laura, Carla and Irene) giving us an insight into their mindsets and emotions while also setting the stage for deception, lies of omission or at the very least, varied perspectives of the truth. The back and forth in the timelines of the characters' stories reveal past pain, trauma and perhaps, more crucially from the standpoint of the mystery at hand, motivations to commit a murder. The constantly bobbing narrative structure and the twists in the plot are reminiscent of a boat rocking in shallow waters. Hawkins is clever in her use of stock characters like the harmless, confused old woman in Irene or Laura, the mentally-unstable young woman with a history of physically lashing out. It’s the sort of stuff that encourages jumping to conclusions based almost solely on assumptions and stereotyping, allowing the author to use our minds to create red herrings out of ordinary character traits. Paula Hawkins employs the technique of nesting a story within another to flesh out part of a character’s backstory, set up a portion of the climax and raise questions about plagiarism in literary circles. The nested story and its implications work well enough and add to the tension in A Slow Fire Burning . The frayed threads of family torn apart by a tragedy in the past which changed for ever the lives of everyone involved is an idea running through the novel. Speaking of the past, trauma is part of almost all the characters’ life stories and very much informs their personalities and choices in the present. Even so, none of these characters came across as particularly likeable or even sympathetic. Not even Laura who, by far, has the worst luck of the lot. I put this lack of sympathy down to her lack of agency and her constant sense of her own victimhood. She never seems to take responsibility for her own actions. It’s always someone else’s fault. As a result, her misfortunes fail to evoke the kind of sympathy a more likeable character would have received. The theme that comes across most strongly in this novel is that hurt people hurt people. You might think I’m giving away a clue. I’m not, because this is a novel packed choc-a-bloc with damaged characters who end up hurting other people. A Slow Fire Burning explores the destructiveness of trauma and how it ends up snowballing into even worse consequences. Is A Slow Fire Burning worth a read? That’s for you to decide. If you do pick it up, be prepared to read on through a sluggish opening which may leave you wondering what’s going on. Don’t expect a great deal of pace until the last few chapters, which have rather convenient revelations falling over each other to help the reader arrive at the identity of the killer. Which, in itself, is not that surprising. You’ll probably see it coming.

I never met Mr Ratan Tata. Nor have I ever worked for a Tata-owned organisation. Yet, his passing left me in tears. It felt like we’ve been robbed of something very precious. I spoke to a longtime friend, Smriti last night. She said that she’d been poring over videos of Mr Tata’s funeral and articles chronicling his life since she heard the news. She wondered if being so affected by the death of someone who is technically a stranger made her a ‘freak’. I told her I felt the same way. To this she said, “I’m so glad I’m not a freak. Or that we are freaks together.” She verbalised what I was feeling. The oddness of grieving for someone known to us only through news reports, rare interviews and legends narrated by his associates. Of course, we’ve all been long-time consumers of the many, many products and services produced by Tata brands but that has nothing to do with it. As I scrolled through social media and read comments from Indians across walks of life, I repeatedly come across the phrase ‘personal loss’. Why are so many people feeling this way? Photo Courtesy: Instagram I’ve tried to understand what makes Ratan Tata’s passing feel like a personal loss. Since the only perspective I’m truly privy to is my own, then that’s how I shall proceed. I had planned to publish a post about work-related truths today. However, late on Wednesday night, Mr Ratan Tata breathed his last. The news spread like wild fire on social media. Upon reading a statement from the Tata Group Chairperson, N Chandrasekaran, I felt a sense of emptiness and disbelief. A dull sheath of gloom descended upon me. To me, Mr Tata represented the idea of doing the right thing even in circumstances where it is obvious that profits lie in accommodating grey areas. I believe there is a Greek inscription that greets visitors at TCS House in Mumbai that reads, “Walk the Straight Line.” Sounds simple enough but practised by very few. We live in a cynical world where ethics, friendship and common decency are sacrificed at the altar of profit and short-term thinking. Here was a man who never indulged in self-aggrandizement, arrogance or hypocrisy and was unfailingly humble and disarmingly considerate. Photo Courtesy: Instagram While the Tata name has long been synonymous with nation-building and being the trustees of the people of India, stories about Ratan Tata always reflect his regard for the last person in the room. I recall an Instagram post by him requesting blood donors for a dog in Mumbai, suffering from suspected tick fever and life-threatening anaemia. Mumbai responded in the best way possible. Five dogs accompanied by their humans came forward to donate blood. A cross-match was found and all ended well. That would’ve been enough for most. Mr Tata, however, returned to Instagram the next day to post pictures of the five dogs who showed up to help and named all of them (Casper, Leo, Scooby, Ronny and Ivan) in his post. It is such thoughtfulness that makes me tear up. In a world where genuine connection is hard to find and people walk around too distracted to listen to each other, Mr Tata exemplified the power of empathy and kindness. He was famously a dog-lover with both Bombay House and the Taj properties throwing open their doors to homeless dogs in all kinds of weather. His example inspires people like me to do my bit as well. Stories of Mr Tata’s generosity and concern for the well-being of everyone who worked for his companies and even those who didn’t, are the stuff of legend and may they continue to be repeated for years to come because they matter. The stories are endless from what he did for the injured or the families of those killed in the 2008 attack on the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel in Mumbai, his contribution to improving healthcare infrastructure by funding cancer hospitals or the Tata Group’s exemplary service during the Covid pandemic. Mr Tata was proof that genuine goodness and goodwill that is not aimed at gaining publicity has a sheen that is impossible to tarnish. What’s more, it has the power to inspire anyone who witnesses it. The very chemistry of our bodies supports this idea. Of the four ‘happy hormones’ coursing through our bodies, oxytocin and serotonin are called the ‘selfless’ chemicals, making us do nice things for other people. This helps form bonds of friendship and trust. Each time we cooperate or help someone, the release of the serotonin and oxytocin make us feel rewarded with feelings of fulfilment, belonging, trust and camaraderie. The most interesting thing about oxytocin, however, is that not only does the person exhibiting the tiniest bit of goodness get a shot of oxytocin, the person receiving the kindness also gets a shot of the feel-good hormone. But that’s not all. Even someone merely witnessing the act of generosity gets a chemical boost. Simply seeing or hearing about acts of kindness makes us happy and inspires us to do the same. In a way, Ratan Tata was our dose of oxytocin – reminding us to be proud to be Indian, inspiring us to do better as human beings, counselling us about there being more to life than scoring a promotion or a pay hike. Mr Tata was a living embodiment of how it is possible to be gracious and considerate while having nerves of steel. I believe everyone who has been moved to tears by Mr Tata’s passing and felt like they lost a loved one, is right to feel so. His close aide, Shantanu Naidu referred to him as his ‘lighthouse’. While Shantanu was lucky enough to be mentored by Mr Tata for a number of years, the rest of us echo his sentiment. Ratan Tata was a lighthouse to us all, albeit a distant one. His life has been a beacon that has lit up the way and cut through some dark nights. I recall an interview where Mr Tata was asked how he would like to be remembered. In his inimitable humble way, he said, “I’d like to be remembered as a person who made a difference. Not anything more, not anything less.” If there ever was an understatement, this must be it. Long Live Ratan Naval Tata. May his legacy never fade. P.S. Smriti, if we’re ‘freaks’, so be it. I suspect we're not the only ones.

The past is a strange thing. It can never be relived even though we often carry it with us. We’ve all been down paths of nostalgia remembering with fondness even that which had, in the past, felt like tough times. And then, there are pieces of the past we visit every day without giving them much thought. For instance, you may tie the laces of your left shoe before the right because a kindergarten classmate told you that it was lucky. Now, decades later, you continue to do so subconsciously. Come to think of it, it’s likely the only remnant of the friendship you once shared. I think of these as little legacies. It could be anything at all – a friend’s remedy to avoid a hangover, an oft-repeated phrase, a recipe passed down by a family member, a lesson imparted by a favourite teacher or a superstition created on a day when things worked out well for you. I know someone who supports a sports team she was introduced to by a friend. Time and circumstance eroded their bond but not before loyalty to the team took root in her heart and now, it’s her team. But if you look closely, it’s a legacy of their friendship. It is said that the tragedy of human life is that we are loved more than we will ever know. And that love is reflected in our adoption of the traits, habits or gestures of the people we like. We carry these little legacies with us for years, if not the rest of our lives. In that way, so much of what or who we are, is a gift from those we’ve known. Sometimes, the association may be brief but the impact is lifelong. Perhaps, we are all like giant jigsaws with pieces borrowed from people who crossed our paths and walked beside us for a while until the next fork in the road. A friend of mine, Reema taught me the basics of badminton on a makeshift open court with what only someone very kind would call a threadbare net. We went on to play on beautiful, indoor wooden courts and also, improved as players. Reema and I lost touch but my love for badminton persists and I continue to play. That’s another little legacy. The quirks and affinities we pick up without ever being able to pinpoint their original source fascinate me the most. I like to believe that my writing the digit 7 with a pen stroke slashing through its torso or using a hair comb pin in my hair are souvenirs from places and people that lay dormant in my memory. Their origins are lost to me and yet, they’re a part of my life today. How poetic it is that a quote about such legacies is attributed to Anonymous, “What you leave as a legacy is not what is etched in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others.” Another friend of mine, Raj is a stickler for checking the air pressure of his vehicle’s spare tyre before a long trip. It’s a habit he picked up from his father and it’s served him well over the years. There’s a journey metaphor in there which I will spare you! You may start to ponder about the little legacies littered throughout your days and life and yet, barely any come to mind when you think about them actively. I know it to be so because I’ve tried it. When it finally strikes you, drop me a line in the comments. In the meantime, here’s another of mine. Teresa, the owner of the salon in Delhi where I like to get a haircut, showed me how to blow-dry my hair for extra volume and bounce. I use her technique whenever I want my hair to look extra-nice. I’m certain Teresa didn’t give any thought to the value she was adding to my life and yet, here I am—writing about something I learnt from her. Little legacies are just gestures, habits and ideas assimilated into our lives through a kind of unconscious osmosis. And yet, nostalgia burnishes the most ordinary of things with the lustre of value and charm. Only that which is continued by another, persists. Everything else ends with us. So, may you never minimise the value of little legacies and the role they play in all our lives.

The protagonist of The Lake of Dreams  is Lucy Jarrett, a woman in her late-twenties living in Japan with her half English-half Japanese boyfriend, Yoshi. Feeling adrift without a job and concerned about her mother, Lucy flies back home to a quaint little town called Lake of Dreams in upstate New York. Built almost a hundred years ago, her family home is in a constant state of disrepair and stands on the edge of the lake the town is named after. The book really starts when Lucy finds a stack of letters locked away under a window seat in her childhood home. The writer of the letters is a female ancestor Lucy has never heard of while the recipient of the letters is her great-grandfather, Joseph whose story is part of the family lore. The plot primarily follows Lucy’s tracking down the identities and stories of her female ancestor and her estranged daughter. However, many obvious questions, like who locked away the letters and why, are never answered. The carousel of objects hidden away in the bowels of Lucy's house borders on the improbable or ridiculous, depending on the extent of your suspension of disbelief. And the novel is the weaker for it. An undercurrent of making sense of the past and making peace with it in order to move ahead runs deep through The Lake of Dreams. One such is the guilt Lucy carries for her father’s unresolved death in a fishing accident ten years ago. The author reiterates several times that Lucy’s nomadic lifestyle and lack of stability in her romantic relationships is a result of unprocessed grief and guilt over her father’s death. Kim Edwards’ writing is heavy on description and metaphor and gets a bit tedious especially where it slows down the pace of the plot. Metaphors of water and fire are pretty much drummed into the writing. There’s also the metaphor of land and earthquakes which predictably signals a life-altering change in the protagonist’s life. As much as I enjoy lyrical writing and an apt metaphor, a novel called The Lake of Dreams  featuring a house situated on the edge of a lake with a protagonist who is a hydrologist and prone to revelatory dreams has all the subtlety of a jackhammer!   The biggest letdown, however, is how clues regarding her ancestor’s life keep landing at Lucy’s feet even though what she is investigating took place almost a century ago. You might think, like I did, that searching for that information would be full of hiccups and dead-ends. Not in The Lake of Dreams . Here they are laid out on a platter and to be found within a comfortable driving distance! The strongest element of The Lake of Dreams  for me is how Edwards weaves in the history of the suffragettes taking on legal and social injustices and how Lucy’s ancestor, Rose strove to find her place in the sun during an era when women were thought of as merely wives and housekeepers. To have Lucy dusting off the sands of anonymity from Rose’s story and her role in their family’s history is where the heart of this novel lies. It reminded me of a line by Virginia Woolf, “For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.” However, the subplots in The Lake of Dreams  are disjointed and appear to exist merely to provide a break from the main thrust of the novel and induce some narrative tension into the plot. The same is true of the love triangle between Yoshi, Lucy and her childhood sweetheart, Keegan. It starts off fine but ends up flatter than day-old champagne. I understand that books have limitations of length but even so, characters feel realistic only when they are more than cardboard cutouts and act in accordance with their own personalities, motivations and goals. Instead, in The Lake of Dreams, most characters just float into whatever position Lucy’s story needs them to be. Kim Edwards fails to make us care about her protagonist even as she hands her the benefit of a first-person narrative. Maybe it is because things come too easily to Lucy and the internal conflicts she faces just melt away into nothingness when convenient. That makes for neither a memorable character nor an engaging story.

Let’s say you’re looking for book recommendations and head to Goodreads.com to see what’s good (even though you could as easily go to my site!). Sidestepping the ones with the one-star ratings and bad reviews, you find a few books by new authors that have good reviews. You order them on Amazon, Kindle or Audible. Well done! You’re just the kind of reader Amazon’s looking for. After all, they own each of these platforms (from Goodreads which deals in reviews, to Amazon, Kindle and Audible which deliver books to you in your preferred form. What’s more, they own the means of production as well - Kindle Direct Publishing and Amazon Publishing). So, you’ve paid for a book and provided them with vital market research data on what sells, so that they can tailor their future publications to those parameters. Is that necessarily a bad thing? Let’s put a pin in that and return to it later. THE BEGINNING OF AMAZON Amazon started selling books online in 1994. Jeff Bezos picked books as his product of choice because in comparison to all the things one could sell online, books offer a unique advantage. In an interview recorded in June 1997, Bezos said,   “There are more items in the book category than there are items in any other category, by far.” Think about it. Nobody who buys books (except those who buy three aesthetically pleasing ones to place on their coffee table) ever thinks that since they have 20 books, they don’t need any more. Setting aside consumables, only a miniscule number of products possess this quality. Bezos went on to name the other product that shared this quality, “Music is No. 2 — there are about 200,000 active music CDs at any given time. But in the book space, there are over 3 million different books worldwide active in print at any given time across all languages, [and] more than 1.5 million in English alone.” As with anything, where there is a positive, there is a downside too. The book business is a business with a long tail . Which is another way of saying that there are significant profits to be made by selling books that are relatively hard to find because they aren’t bestsellers. Most brick-and-mortar bookstores don’t find it feasible to stock them since they don’t sell as much as the latest thriller and as such, are a waste of precious space. THE LONG TAIL OF THE BOOK BUSINESS The term long tail was coined by Chris Anderson. He argued that products in less demand and with low sales volume, provided they were numerous enough (as is the case with books and music), can collectively make up a market share which rivals or exceeds the individual sales of a relatively small number of bestsellers. The fly in this particular ointment is that an inventory of millions of titles requires lots of storage space. And real estate costs money. That’s where the internet comes in as the ideal distribution channel. It allows a seller to have a gigantic warehouse on the outskirts of a small town, instead of a tiny bookstore in a high-traffic area in the city, with a monthly rent that has them considering selling their organs on the black market. It’s the perfect mix - a vast inventory with a storefront convenient for customers. After all, it's right there on your phone. That’s why Amazon is online. A BUYER’S MARKET The focus of this post is not Amazon’s online presence. Instead, it seeks to figure out what it means to any sector of business when one company takes over almost all aspects of the industry and uses that omnipresence to becomes a monopsony. The word monopsony is a recent addition to my vocabulary. It is a mirror image of the word monopoly with one key difference. While in a monopoly, there is only one seller who can charge as they see fit, a monopsony is a market with only one buyer, who can purchase at whatever price they like. Which is why the dwindling numbers of publishers is a concern for writers and eventually, readers. THE DIMINISHING RETURNS OF THE SELF-PUBLISHING BOOM You could say the decline of traditional publishers isn’t really a problem since so many authors are choosing to self-publish. You’re partially correct. Let's see how this plays out. At the moment, most authors who choose to self-publish are getting a bigger slice of the revenue pie than they would if they went with a traditional publisher (with the exception of some bestselling authors). However, that may not always be the case. Especially when all other publishers are pushed out of the game. In fact, you don’t have to wait that long to see the direction in which things are headed. As of July 2022, the Kindle Direct Publishing payout per page read in the United States was $0.0043. In July 2015, the payout per page was $0.0058. That’s a 25% drop over a 7-year period.   WILL BOOKS BECOME JUST ANOTHER PRODUCT? What creative freedom and quality of writing can we expect when editors are replaced by managers who are guided solely by spreadsheets and the prospect of profit? I am not imagining this authorial dystopia. Authors commissioned by Amazon’s imprints like Thomas and Mercer and Kindle Press who choose to put their books on Kindle Unlimited are compensated per page read. That, per se, is not the problem. However, since these e-readers collect every possible data point, it is safe to conclude that there is an end use in mind for all that data. It doesn’t take much imagination to think that authors and editors may tailor their works to get more page views instead of honing the story, theme or characterisation. I am reminded of a scene from the Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks film, You’ve Got Mail  where Tom Hanks' character sarcastically compares books to a “ten-gallon vat of olive oil”. Let’s hope it won’t come to that. You could argue that market demand has always played a role in which genre or writer is promoted over another. You’re right. The difference now is the amount of pinpointed data that is available to publishers. It is, honestly, unprecedented. When in history have the publishers of any book known at which page did a reader close the book never to open it again? CONCLUSION There have always been folks who write solely for money and some who write as an expression of their creativity, and good writing is not the sole domain of either. It is one thing for the earnings of a Wuthering Heights to be eclipsed by the royalties of a Fifty Shades of Grey . That’s fine and has probably already happened. However, what a loss it would be for us all if the next Animal Farm or  Fahrenheit 451  are not published because they’re deemed ‘unviable’ by a manager or worse, a software looking solely for the next blockbuster mediocrity. Good luck finding something good to read then. Especially on Goodreads.

When reading a book, I often pause to reread a line or phrase to admire the artistry of its construction or the beauty of the thought expressed. I feel excited about returning to the book while I go about my other activities because I can't wait to find out what happens next. And yet, something strange happens as the book approaches completion. I try to slow down because I don't want to let go of the characters yet and I don't want the story to end. But end it does. Over the years, my favourite books have always left me with ideas, fragments of dialogue or expressions that made them unique. In no particular order, these are five of my favourites from the best books I read this year.  EVERYTHING I NEVER TOLD YOU by CELESTE NG Celeste Ng’s debut revolves around the lives of a mixed-race family of five, the Lees. The novel opens on the day of their older daughter, Lydia’s disappearance and death. This isn’t a whodunnit. Instead, it explores each character’s heart-breaking secrets which they kept to themselves in the hope of holding on to each other and the price they end up paying for their silence. Ng paints a moving portrait of the immigrant experience as well as what it feels like to be considered different in a college town in Middle America. Read it for its emotion, style and pace. I was left with a pit in my stomach wishing things had turned out differently for the Lees. ORIENTING: AN INDIAN IN JAPAN by PALLAVI AIYAR Orienting: An Indian in Japan  is divided into ten chapters, each dealing with an element of the Japanese experience. For the average Nipponophile like myself, anecdotes about lost umbrellas and tiffin-boxes that are almost always located and returned, the intoxicating fervour of the sakura-viewing season and technological marvels fit right into my idea of what Japan, with its sushi-dispensing vending machines and kintsugi  philosophy, is all about. That's not all though. Chapters dealing with the foibles of Japanese culture, including their oppressive working hours, political apathy and xenophobia provide a balanced view of what living in Japan is like. Pallavi Aiyar writes with the clarity and specificity of a journalist and the whimsy and humour of a novelist, making this part memoir, part travel literature and partly, a collection of essays immensely readable. SHE WHO BECAME THE SUN by SHELLEY PARKER-CHAN She Who Became the Sun  is a reimagining of the rise to power of the Hongwu emperor, better known as the founding ruler of the famed Ming dynasty. The twist in this reimagined tale is that this is the story of a girl who is foretold a life that will amount to nothing while a glorious future is predicted for her brother. A historical fantasy novel, She Who Became the Sun is about desire, destiny and the desire to alter one’s destiny. Shelley Parker-Chan’s style is lyrical yet pacy with characters drawn from real life with weaknesses, conflicting desires and ill-judgement, making them come alive. The characters of this novel have stayed with me long after I turned the last page. Their joy, ambition, pain and desire leaves its mark thanks to Parker-Chan’s splendid writing. I look forward to reading the next book in the series.  TALKING TO MY DAUGHTER ABOUT THE ECONOMY by YANIS VAROUFAKIS I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Yanis Varoufakis makes the story of the rise of capitalism such an entertaining story with lots of references to iconic movies, Greek mythology and classic literature that you may be forgiven for thinking of economics as interesting! Get your hands on a copy if you would like to read about industrialisation, colonialism and the rise of debt as the backbone of our economy without falling asleep. I was delighted by his perspective and his lack of jargon. Does it explain everything? No. But does it make you want to read on and learn a bit more than you know? Yes, and it’s a fun read. What’s not to like? THE TRUTH ABOUT THE HARRY QUEBERT AFFAIR by JOEL DICKER The Truth about the Harry Quebert Affair  is a cold case whodunnit delivered with a literary flair. It’s a novel about two authors – Harry Quebert, a celebrated senior writer who is arrested for murder, 33 years after a fifteen-year-old girl goes missing; and Marcus Goldman his protégé who, struggling with writer’s block after his successful first novel, resolves to clear his mentor’s name. With a host of suspects, fading recollections and looming deadlines, Marcus is up against plenty of challenges. This is an absolute page-turner with lots of plot twists. Joel Dicker’s style and narrative technique make it even better by imbuing an investigative thriller plot with literary allusions, three-dimensional characters and social commentary without letting up on the pace. Read it if you’re looking for an riveting book to curl up with this weekend.

Have you ever broken into a sweat at the thought of attending a meeting or even going to work, had hands that trembled as they reached for a bottle of water, experienced a sense of isolation and loneliness or just been enveloped in a cloud of dread that sucks the joy out of any situation, painting it the drab colours of pessimism? You could be suffering from anxiety or the effects of exposure to long term stress. It changes you in ways that you didn’t imagine possible or logical. And everything seems tougher to deal with. But I’m not here to tell you how it feels or how to deal with it because frankly, I don’t have the requisite knowledge or expertise. I just want to talk about anxiety, why it exists and how it impacts us. THE PURPOSE OF ANXIETY What is the purpose of anxiety? To answer that, you’ll need to reach back into our evolution as creatures on this planet. Stress and anxiety were essential to our survival. Imagine an ancestor from long ago, when early humans still roamed the land in search of sustenance. Let’s say we’ve travelled back to thirteen thousand years ago when Homo Sapiens were still hunters and gatherers. Now imagine, the said ancestor falling asleep under the stars. It’s a cool evening with a gentle breeze sweeping across, the sound of distant crickets acts as a lullaby. A twig snaps and dry leaves rustle, rousing your ancestor. She spots some movement in the shadows. Here’s my guess, she ran away as fast as she could from the scene of danger, real or imagined. After all, you’re here, aren’t you? You wouldn’t be, if she hadn’t run. And not just once, but every time. Better to run from a moving shadow once too often than be eaten by a predator just once. The stakes, you see, couldn’t have been higher. Therefore, it is obvious that stress and its consequent fight or flight response have been a boon, evolutionarily. It’s kept us worried enough to stay alive. WE AREN’T ALONE Human beings aren’t the only animals that suffer bouts of stress. Most animals do, whether it’s the chimpanzees, sparrows, or zebras. Who knows, maybe even touch-me-nots are anxious little things! Why else do they shrink from contact? Setting aside my lame plant jokes, let’s return to zebras. Robert Sapolsky, a biologist at Stanford University asked an important question- why do zebras not get ulcers? His book, in a coup of book titles, is called Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers. Come to think of it, zebras have their share of stress. They have to look for food and water while trying to not get eaten by a lion who is also looking for food and water. Why then do zebras not suffer from anxiety as we do? Sapolsky states, “Zebras and lions may see trouble coming in the next minute and mobilise a stress response in anticipation, but they can’t get stressed about events far into the future.” The point Robert Sapolsky makes is that zebras don’t get ulcers from the anxiety of getting eaten because they don’t anticipate stress like humans do. The anxiety caused by a stressful event is bad enough, but the anticipation and trepidation make it much worse. Zebras, unlike humans, don’t suffer from this. DIFFERENT STAKES, SAME RESPONSE Another complication is that the biological responses of human beings haven’t evolved that much in the last 12,000 years even though our circumstances have changed dramatically compared to, say, a zebra. We have many more things to stress over than we did in our hunter-gatherer days. Sadly, our biological and hormonal responses remain the same even if the stressor in question is now a foul-mouthed boss instead of a sabre-toothed tiger. And while jobs are important, most of them aren't exactly life-or-death, making our levels of anxiety disproportionate to the danger we face. Yet, the stress caused by impending mortgage payments, irregular daily routines, rush hour traffic, over-stimulation caused by information overload that is modern media and fretting over signifiers of social status still cause our brains to release adrenaline and cortisol. These hormones, in turn, increase heart rate, respiration and blood pressure putting more physical stress on our organs. Long-term stress can be a contributing factor in heart disease, high blood pressure, stroke and other illnesses. Going back to the zebras, they probably deal with such stress once a day. Most human beings today, deal with mini-stressors hundreds of times a day. Top this with the additional misery of being an overthinker. The only perk for someone given to constant catastrophizing and overthinking is that they’re literally imagining more than half their problems. Most of them will never come to pass or even if they do, they won’t be nearly as terrible as imagined. It’s like Mark Twain said, “I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them have never happened.” THE FEAR OF ANXIETY AND VICE VERSA All this worry, even about stuff that will never happen will still give you ulcers. Perhaps Mr Twain had them too. If you think I’m being unnecessarily alarmist while I take a dig at overthinkers, I have two things to say to you. One, that I sympathise with overthinkers being one myself. The second is an example of a study conducted on sparrows. As part of their experiment, Canadian researchers decided to block off with nets a whole area of a forest that was the sparrows’ habitat, shutting out their natural predators - racoons, owls and falcons. With this intervention, the sparrows were obviously safer. The researchers then hid loudspeakers in various parts of the forest. In one area of the woods, they played sounds made by predators while in the other region, unthreatening forest sounds. The sparrows exposed to ‘dangerous’ noises laid 40% fewer eggs. Even the eggs they did lay were smaller and fewer of them hatched. Many of the baby sparrows starved to death because their parents were too frightened to fly out in search of food. The chicks that survived were weaker. The experiment shows that it doesn’t take a real threat to mar the lives of sparrows and their young. Fear, and the anxiety caused by it, is enough. The same holds true for humans but we can choose to reduce our exposure to our stressors in certain cases and also adopt healthy practices to act as antidotes to deal with those that we can’t avoid. And most importantly, live in the present, like zebras do.

There was a time when to be considered well-educated and cultured, you had to be able to recall facts, figures and preferably, whole passages from notable books verbatim. Today, all that is considered old hat and unnecessary. Barring one or two, I don’t know any people under the age of 50 who could recite a poem from memory. Forget poetry, I’d be surprised to meet someone who can dial more than 4 cellphone numbers, belonging to people they speak to regularly, without diving for their mobile. The externalisation of our memories got us to this point. ... and most of the them aren't responding! From phone numbers and email addresses to birthdays and anniversaries, it’s all saved on our phones or on some faraway cloud. There are people who believe that in the hectic, information-overloaded lives we lead, it makes sense to let external memories take care of these small potatoes for us. But is the externalisation of our memories only about freeing up our grey cells for more lofty matters? Or is it a move to pronounce memory a relic in our post post-modern or metamodern times or whatever else folks are calling the decades we’ve lived through in this century? It's been fashionable for some time now to disparage all kinds of memorisation in education as rote-learning. The slow disappearance of memorization in classrooms has its philosophical roots in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s 1762 novel, Emile: Or, On Education. It was a book about a child raised by means of a “natural education,” learning only through self-experience. Rousseau abhorred memorization, amongst other statutes of institutional education at the time. “Reading is the great plague of childhood,” he wrote. While there is no doubt, I’m sure, that the educational ideology that Rousseau so disliked was genuinely mind-numbing and called for improvement, I’m not so sure that reading is such an evil so as to be compared to a plague. In today’s context, maybe calling it a pain in the neck would be more like it! Jokes apart, I agree that children learn more from growing plants than memorising scientific classifications of plant species. Therefore, should all facts be tossed out of the window? There are those who consider the learning of dates and events in history to be pointless since we can just look them up on the internet, within seconds. Sure, you could, if you knew what you were looking for. For instance, if I asked you when the Great Depression began, you could just google it. That’s very well, if the question is specific. But what if we were talking about the Second World War? Could you have made the connection between the impact that the Great Depression had on Germany’s already strained economy culminating in Hilter’s elevation to the top job, leading eventually to the outbreak of World War II if you’d never read about the Great Depression of 1929? Making connections requires, at the very least, a basic understanding of what happened, when and why. The precise dates don't matter but the broad timelines of events do. Without that, it’s like walking through a fog. Don’t believe me? Then you’ve clearly never searched for the word ‘ouija’ in a dictionary only on the basis of its pronunciation without having the foggiest idea of its spelling. I assure you, it’s not for the easily-frustrated! Another opinion one hears a lot nowadays, is how schools should be teaching students how to think, not what to think and therefore, the focus on learning about too many ‘boring things' should be minimised, and out-of-the-box thinking encouraged. I’m a big fan of people possessing critical thinking skills but I’ve never known anyone who can think coherently without having the ability to recall at least some facts and having a fundamental knowledge of how things came about in the field being discussed. A certain grounding is essential. It’s very rare that reasoning ability, creativity and independent thinking, let alone revolutionary new ideas, emerge without at least, some learning. Most of us are not Srinivasa Ramanujam and therefore, need some help before we can begin to expound. The key, I believe, lies in focusing on understanding ideas and the correlation and causality between things, not memorizing minutiae. Speaking of bright people, have you noticed how people who know a lot about a lot always seem to be able to remember the new stuff they learn faster than others who don’t know as much? Why is that? Is it possible that like in the case of money, it takes knowledge to gain knowledge? I mean that in order to understand new things, one needs a conceptual framework, a lattice of ideas and concepts, if you will. New information sticks faster and better if you have something for it to latch itself onto. Obviously, this lattice is not built only of information found in books but also grows out of experiential learning and one’s interests. But the point is, that it needs to be remembered in order to be useful. One way to foster inquisitive, knowledgeable people is to give them, in some measure, the basic signposts that can guide them through a life of learning. Creativity is the ability to spark connections between what you know from memory, what you see in the present and what you’d like to create. I read somewhere that Mnemosyne, the Goddess of Memory, was the mother of the Muses. This is one of those times when Greek mythology gets it right on the money! For me to have added this delicious little nugget here, I had to remember it because there is no way that I could’ve googled that, without first having, at least, an inkling of the myth. Educational reform that sets off to vanquish evils such as memorizing may make school more pleasant for students but will it really help them think more critically or creatively? That’s a question we need to think about before we start demonising everything that needs to be remembered. Before I end, I want to share that when I was writing this post, I passed by my father’s study and he was listening to We didn’t start the Fire by Billy Joel. It’s always been a favourite of mine and it got me thinking. If I hadn’t read or heard about the events and people mentioned, would I have appreciated the song?