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Published in 2021, Orienting with its qualifier sub-title An Indian in Japan is a book about just that - an Indian orienting herself to life in Japan. The author, Pallavi Aiyar is a journalist who has reported for The Hindu and Business Standard from China, Indonesia and parts of Europe. Writing books documenting her years in some of these countries is part of her repertoire, with several books to her name. Orienting opens with Aiyar and family touching down in Tokyo in the summer of 2016. Her husband, Julio is a diplomat with the European Union and that entails moving from one country to another every few years. Orienting is divided into ten chapters, each dealing with an element of the Japanese experience. For an average Nipponophile like myself (my fascination is mostly cultural), anecdotes about lost umbrellas and tiffin-boxes that are almost always located and returned, the intoxicating fervour of the sakura-viewing season and the technological marvel that the Japanese call a toilet fit right into my idea of what Japan, with its sushi-dispensing vending machines and kintsugi philosophy, is all about. And before you roll your eyes at my inordinate praise of Japanese toilets, read this, “Manufacturer Matsushita’s “smart toilet” took urine and stool analysis, and could check the user’s blood pressure, temperature and blood sugar while at it. One of its models was even equipped with electrodes… yielding a digital measurement of body-fat ratio.” Now that we’ve established that I don’t use the phrase ‘technological marvel’ loosely, let’s move on. One of my favourite chapters was about the concepts of kintsugi and wabi-sabi . Wabi-sabi refers to seeing and accepting the beauty in impermanence and imperfection like loving an old and slightly wonky coffee mug. Kintsugi , I suppose, grows out of wabi-sabi . Literally, ‘ kin ’ means ‘gold’ while ‘ tsugi ’ refers to ‘join’. Hence, kintsugi is the art of joining broken things with gold, making broken artifacts more precious in the bargain. It’s the kind of minimalist metaphor that makes one fall in love with Japanese thought. And the author is quite effusive in her enthusiasm. Aiyar doesn’t shy away from highlighting her own failings especially in the area of her long and not-so-successful attempt at learning Japanese. The humour with which she talks about it is disarming and makes her struggle immediately relatable. She writes, “In Chinese, ‘thanks’ was ‘xie xie’, end of matter. In Japanese, there was ‘arigatou’ – informal, ‘arigatou gosaimasu’ – proper form, ‘domo arigatou gosaimasu’ seriously thankful, and ‘domo sumimasen arigatou gosaimasu’ – weak-in-the-knees-with-gratitude-thankful. Then I came across, ‘yoroshiku onegaishimasu’. ‘What does that mean?’ I asked my teacher. ‘It means, thank you,’ she replied. Basically, it was possible to learn Japanese for a whole month and only end up being able to say thank you.” Her frustration is relatable, hilarious and practically leaps off the page. I suppose fluency in Japanese requires shokunin (the relentless pursuit of perfection through the honing of a single craft). Reading about the Japanese idea of striving for perfection in Orienting reminded me of something I read in Arsene Wenger’s biography My Life in Red and White. Wenger wrote that in his time managing the Japanese team, Nagoya Grampus, he had to hide the balls to stop the players from practicising too much, so intense was their desire to improve. I would’ve been charmed by this book just for all the stuff I’ve mentioned but it is made all the more memorable for highlighting the foibles of Japanese culture including their oppressive working hours, political apathy and xenophobia. Whether the xenophobia stems from their reluctance or inability to speak English, their horror at foreigners not following the etiquette required in almost every aspect of life in Japan from separating garbage to eating at a restaurant to warm spring bathing, or just plain old racism is open to interpretation. Orienting also shows us that the fabled Japanese homogeneity is just that – a fable they tell themselves and the whole world. Communities like the Zainichi (of Korean origin) and the Burakumin are proof of that. Apart from this, Orienting - An Indian in Japan taught me that much of what I admired about Japan was originally Chinese from the practice of Zen to the Japanese writing system, ceramics, paper and literary influences. To their credit, the Japanese have added their own spin to it – either by elevating the rustic as in the case of wabi sabi or polishing it to a level of such sophistication that can exclude those not as well-versed in it. A case in point would be the famed Japanese tea ceremony. It has a whole plethora of rules that may seem incidental to the casual viewer. But here’s a tip. Nothing is incidental in chado – the way of the tea. From the manner of serving the tea, to holding the bowl properly, casual allusions to literary classics and season-appropriate poetry to having enough knowledge of ceramics to be able to comment with authority on the texture and quality of the utensils are all intrinsic to the ceremony. I suppose it goes without saying that it isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. However, the great tea masters dismiss the idea that the ceremony is about anything more than drinking tea. Aiyar reflects on this with a quote by French art critic, Georges Duthuit’s observation on Zen-inspired painting: “Draw bamboos for ten years, become a bamboo and then forget all about bamboo when painting.” In the same way, I’m convinced that talk of tea simply being tea is just talk. But it charmed me, nevertheless. 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. In my opinion, someone who casts two cats as protagonists, as Aiyar did in her book, Chinese Whiskers: The Adventures of Soyabean and Tofu, is certainly a voice worth listening to. In conclusion, I would most certainly recommend Orienting: An Indian in Japan to anyone who wants to know more about Japan or simply wants an answer to how Japan is so clean without any trashcans in sight? As for me, I look forward to her next book about her time in her husband’s home country, Spain, where she and her family moved in mid-2020.

Leaders Eat Last begins with a foreword by George J. Flynn, a Retired Lieutenant General of the U.S. Marine Corps. The General gets straight to the point in his opening sentences, “I know of no case study in history that describes an organization that has been managed out of a crisis. Every single one of them was led.” That’s what Leaders Eat Last is about – the difference between managers and leaders, what makes a leader and how all of this impacts everyone with a job, regardless of their place in the totem pole called workplace hierarchy. Feeling valued, safe and brave enough to take risks for the greater good is on everyone’s wishlist, even if it isn’t verbalised. Simon Sinek shows us how the answers to most of our modern-day troubles lie in our prehistoric biology simply because our species hasn’t changed that much. Everything we do and are is rooted in our biology. And there’s no fooling Mother Nature. I particularly enjoyed the chapters about how the happiness chemicals – endorphins, dopamine, serotonin and oxytocin are responsible for so much that we do; from squeezing in a morning run before work, helping with the dishes after dinner, chasing quarterly sales targets at work or catching up with friends over a drink. We many think it’s about discipline, motivation or affection. Simon Sinek demonstrates that it is about all of the above but that wasn’t Mother Nature’s original intention. As is usually the case with most things that Nature engineered, it was about survival. As is cortisol – the stress hormone . Sinek does a great job of explaining in conversational language how these hormones work and why our world today is causing them to malfunction a wee bit. He uses the metaphor of a snowmobile in the desert. Nothing wrong with the snowmobile or the desert. They’re just not an optimal match. Leaders Eat Last is not one of those books that elaborate only on the problem. Sinek explains why the problem is the problem. He illustrates why large organizations often have trouble holding on to a culture of teamwork and instead break up into silos with paranoia and distrust flowing through the corridors. And it’s not just about Dunbar’s number (which states that we can maintain only around 150 stable connections) but more fundamentally, it is a result of what these organizations stand for and reward. For instance, if meeting the quarterly sales target is the sole aim and only the people who achieve it are rewarded, while the rest are at risk of losing their jobs, then innovation requiring a long-term approach is not likely. Neither is team work. Sinek ties each of these to the hormone they generate, making logical connections to the consequences of each type of behaviour. Before he became a TED talk sensation (Sinek’s 2010 TED talk “How Great Leaders inspire Action” which grew out of his 2009 book, Start with Why is amongst the most viewed TED talks ever), Simon Sinek began his career in advertising, so he certainly knows how to brand and sell an idea. One of these ideas is Circle of Safety. I assume he came up with it since I haven’t heard it being used in a similar context earlier. Sinek uses the analogy of a herd to demonstrate why being liked and protected releases serotonin, while being sidelined leads to feelings of stress and anxiety caused by cortisol pulsing through our systems. Destructive Abundance is another such term. It signifies the imbalance between selfish and selfless pursuits and the results of a mismatch. Sinek stresses the importance of the social contract of leadership. Leaders Eat Last also lays out the roles played by various generations over the last 100 years, and how each of them partly rebelled against and partly perpetuated the ethos they grew up with, and where all of it has brought us. Of course, no one book can summarise the events of a century and their consequences, but Sinek lays down the threads of his thought process. And the rest is for us to think through. The role of abstraction in today’s behemoth corporations is explored and why it leads to a lack of leadership and accountability. What Sinek refers to as abstraction is how people- whether employees or customers – become a statistic, an abstract number. Joseph Stalin expressed this succinctly and Sinek quotes him in his chapter, Managing the Abstraction, “The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of a million is a statistic.” Abstraction robs not only employees or customers of their humanity but also, the leaders of the corporations of theirs, because they no longer see their actions impacting people. They view their actions as only affecting digits on a spreadsheet. Sinek conveys this disconnect when he writes, “Numbers of people aren’t people, they’re numbers.” Speaking of numbers of people, Leaders Eat Last discusses how teams or organisations can cultivate cultures that reward positive behaviour which will, in turn, reap them long-term benefits. Sinek isn’t talking about some high-flying philanthropic approach. It’s practical and far-sighted. There’s an anecdote or two about Goldman Sachs when it was considered a 'gentleman’s' organisation and what makes 3M, the company that makes Post-It Notes, so successful at innovation . It's the kind of stuff that is instantly relatable. The edition I read also had an extended chapter about leading Millennials, who were probably employers’ least favourite employees till Gen Z arrived on the scene! It’s a fairly practical guide for both employers and Millennial employees to make their work lives more fulfilling and productive. Read Leaders Eat Last if you want to understand why certain workplaces and leaders make everything seem better and easier while the others do the opposite. It might also help you formulate a checklist of what to look out for before joining a new workplace. And most importantly, to think about what kind of leader you aspire to be.

What makes the world go round? Romantics say love, the literal-minded spout something about the rotation of our planet while some others say money. If you’re part of the last group of people, read on. Actually, read on regardless, because the subject of this book is likely to come in handy. In Dollars and Sense , economist and bestselling author, Dan Ariely and financial writer and comedian, Jeff Kreisler answer questions about money that we all should be asking in the pursuit of better understanding why we never have enough money. This is a delightfully funny book about our unconscious motivations, irrational instincts and misguided choices regarding money. Dollars and Sense  isn’t a self-help book because it accepts that we can’t help ourselves. In other words, Ariely and Kreisler recognise that we are bound by our psychology to make flawed decisions. By illustrating how our brains and emotions hijack the decision-making process, this book provides us with tools to game the system. The system, in this case, are our own minds. Understanding this can help us make better financial choices, spend smarter and save more. This book seemed like a good investment to me. I wasn’t disappointed. There is no fancy jargon to keep out folks who maintain a safe distance from the pink papers at the newspaper stand. This book discusses the psychology of money in the spirit of a conversation between friends – without judgment and with plenty of anecdotes. You might even find yourself chuckling in recognition at some of the scenarios described in the book because they’re so close to our own lives. Sample this: “Marco Bertini, Elie Ofek and Dan ran an experiment in which they gave coffee to students. They placed milk and sugar nearby in either fancy dishes or Styrofoam cups. Those who got their milk and sugar from the fancier set-up said they liked the coffee more and would pay more for it, even though, unbeknownst to them, it was the same coffee as the one served near the Styrofoam cups.” Tell me this has never happened to you! If it hasn’t, then you’re savvier than yours truly. That’s what makes behavioural economics so interesting and when it’s as well-written and humorous as Dollars and Sense , it’s a win all the way. Ariely and Kreisler break up their book into 3 parts to delve into the following areas: WHAT IS MONEY? Money represents VALUE. Money itself has no value. It only represents the value of other things that we can buy. It’s a messenger of worth.   And then, there is the idea of OPPORTUNITY COSTS. When we spend money on one thing, it’s money we cannot spend on something else, neither now nor any time later. HOW WE ASSESS VALUE IN WAYS THAT HAVE VERY LITTLE TO DO WITH VALUE Ariely and Kreisler shine a light on mind tricks like sale signs promising incredible discounts on marked up prices, the exaggerated value we place on things we own or our self-righteous desire to discard the laws of demand and supply to soothe our sense of fairness. To illustrate our love for sales and how discount signs cause us to make bad money choices, the authors narrate a story about the American department store chain, JCPenney. “In 2012, Ron Johnson, the new CEO of JCPenney, scrapped Penney’s traditional and slightly deceptive practice of marking products up and then marking them back down. In the decades before Johnson’s arrival, JCPenney always offered customers coupons, deals and in-store discounts… Johnson made the store’s prices ‘fair and square.’ No more coupon cutting, bargain hunting and sale gimmicks. Just the real price, roughly equal to those of its rivals and roughly equal to their previous ‘final’ prices… Most customers detested it and abandoned the chain, grumbling about feeling cheated, being misled and betrayed by the real and true cost, and not liking the fair-and-square pricing. Within a year, JCPenney lost an amazing $985 million and Johnson was out of a job.” Just goes to show that customer may be king but that’s not necessarily a good thing for the king! HOW WE CAN DEVELOP BETTER FINANCIAL SENSE We’re human and yes, we make silly choices and place a greater value on pleasure in the present than our needs in the future. Once we know our Achilles’ heel, we can work around it. Ariely and Kreisler appear to be optimists and believe we can use even our irrationality to give ourselves an edge. Packed with real-life stories and thought-provoking experiments, Dollars and Sense really makes one think about our dollars and cents. One of my favourite anecdotes in the book is about Pablo Picasso being approached in the park by a woman who insisted he paint her portrait. He looked her over for a moment, then, with a single stroke, drew her a perfect portrait. “You captured my essence with one stroke. Amazing! How much do I owe you?” “Five thousand dollars,” Picasso replied. “What? How could you want so much? It only took you a few seconds!” “No, ma’am. It took me my entire life and a few more seconds.” Ariely and Kreisler demonstrate how tempting it is to misjudge great value or ability as being too expensive when we fail to acknowledge the years of effort that have gone into achieving a level of excellence. I enjoyed reading Dollars and Sense . You might want to read it too, even if only to answer the eternal question: Cash or Card?

The 90s and 2000s are enjoying a renaissance in entertainment, fashion and make-up trends. Perhaps, for millennials and older generations, it’s fuelled by nostalgia for simpler times before the explosion of social media and information overload. However, this revival is not limited to folks older than 30. It's Gen Z too, even if some of them think they’re inventing it all instead of merely recycling old trends from tall socks, à la Lady Diana to baggy jeans. More surprising is the continued presence of TV shows from the 90s and early 2000s like Friends (aired from 1993-2003) and Gilmore Girls (aired from 2000-2007) on the lists of the most-popular shows on OTT platforms. In an age when so much fresh content is uploaded online every day, what explains this harking back? Is it to unwind from the ‘currentness’ of things—where there is a social pressure to stay updated on all the latest trends? Or is it nostalgia for a time when being earnest wasn’t ‘cringe’? Ask around, while most people watch the latest shows and movies, their idea of ‘ comfort TV ’ is a show from at least 15 years ago. For all you know, even the all-but-dead genre of romantic comedy might stage a comeback. Some of you might shudder at the thought but I enjoy a good romantic comedy because it can be charming, albeit unrealistic and a tad predictable. But most movies are unrealistic. Take Top Gun , for instance. Both the original and the sequel were unrealistic but I enjoyed them. It’s fun to watch something that’s not gunning for awards but also isn’t yet another retelling of some superhero’s origin story from the Marvel or DC Universe. I understand that with genres like superhero films, dystopia, sci-fi and period dramas being the current favourites with movie studios, the romantic comedy is up against a lot of competition. Yet, there is something soothing about a story that isn’t embarrassed by itself and doesn’t hide behind irony and forced self-deprecation. Just as long as it isn’t hobbled by triteness and unrelatable characters because that’s what ruins most romantic comedies. Unrealistic is often confused with unrelatable. If you’d forgive me for stating the painfully obvious—those are two different things. The film, Wall-E  was unrealistic in the sense that the idea of a lonely robot cleaning up an abandoned planet isn’t strictly realistic. I know I haven’t seen that happen in my life. Have you? Yet, the character of Wall-E with his big, round eyes and rusted, clunky body was intensely relatable and tugged at heartstrings across the world. Most of us want to watch all kinds of movies as long as they engage us. And nothing engages people more than people. That’s what separates fiction from non-fiction. The challenge for romantic comedies, per se, is how to make a fairly predictable plot feel fresh and engaging. I don’t think anyone is surprised to find that the actors on the movie poster are the ones who fall in love with each other. Not much of a plot twist, that one! The charm of these stories lies in an inviting premise as well as the chemistry between the characters. The onus of said chemistry lies not just on the actors but also, the writers. Often, the characterisation, plot and dialogue are so meagre, I just can’t be bothered with the fates of the protagonists. And then, there are films like You’ve got Mail that had one critic writing, “Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan should win a Nobel Prize for Chemistry!” I can’t say I disagree since their characters were so charming, bringing out the best in each other over email even as they battled it out in business, which acted as a substantial conflict. All in all, I miss the times when one could walk into a movie theatre and watch a film like He’s just not that into you , The Holiday , Clueless,   Notting Hill  or my personal favourite, You’ve got Mail . Surely, I’m not alone. I predict that romantic comedies and feel-good films like We Bought a Zoo, The Intern  and The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel  are about to make a comeback although they might be slightly different from their 90s-2000s avatar. Something tells me that people are exhausted with bad news on every front – politics, economy, jobs, climate, you name it. I don’t blame them for wanting to unwind with a happy story. Last year’s big sleeper hit, Anyone but You  could well be considered a herald of the upcoming trend. The Glenn Powell-Sydney Sweeney starrer wasn’t exactly a cinematic masterpiece and yet it raked in more than $200 million globally. Based on Shakespeare’s comedy Much Ado about Nothing, it works around the familiar tropes of enemies to lovers. Not exactly new territory, but then what’s new under the sun? Familiarity isn’t always a bad thing. Especially when you can watch it in a pair of sweatpants, fluffy socks with a glass of wine. Oh, and some popcorn!

26-year-old Louisa Clark is unemployed after the café she works at—The Buttered Bun—closes down. She lives in a small English town with her parents, grandfather, sister Katrina and nephew. Her boyfriend of seven years, Patrick, is a fitness freak perpetually preparing for some or the other endurance race. After a few disappointing weeks working at a chicken processing factory and spouting scripted responses while manning the point-of-sale counter at a fast-food restaurant, Louisa accepts a well-paying job as a carer to a quadriplegic, Will Traynor. Louisa is far from keen on the job but the state of her family’s finances is a bigger consideration. Although Louisa is the character through whose perspective we see the story, Me Before You  opens with a scene from Will’s life. In fact, it is the day he meets with the accident that upends his entire life. Before the accident, Will was a partner at a London bank living a luxurious, globe-trotting and adventure-packed life. The accident leaves him paralysed from the neck down except for limited movement in one arm. The equation between the protagonists starts off distant and awkward with Louisa feeling ill-equipped and Will acting aloof and condescending. The coldness between them thaws gradually when they both realise they enjoy each other’s company. Louisa, with her sometimes questionable but always cheerful fashion choices and chirpy demeanour draws Will out of his dreary existence of living with almost constant pain and no change of routine. She fills his days with banter, delightful musical evenings and disastrous horse-racing events. Will, on the other hand, opens up the world for Louisa by encouraging her to read, watch and discuss films and art she has never been exposed to, causing her to gain confidence in her own abilities and potential. The interplay between their different tastes, life experiences and personalities makes for some good banter. Me Before You is a romance that builds slowly from companionship to friendship to a life-changing love. Written mostly from Louisa’s perspective (barring a couple of chapters from the viewpoints of her sister, Katrina, and Will’s nurse, Nathan), we see how Will and Louisa’s mutual affection for each other brings out the best in them even though they’ve met in very difficult circumstances. As far as genre tropes go, Me Before You is a combination of opposites attract and right person, wrong time. What works for the Me Before You is the chemistry between the main characters and the relatability of Louisa’s character. She is ordinary yet unique with real failings and redeeming qualities. Also, Moyes shows us Louisa’s growth as a person subtly, through the choices she makes as the story progresses. Will’s character too is a dynamic one with his emotional depth, candour, honesty and affection being revealed gradually to Louisa and the reader. Through Louisa’s eyes, we witness the extremely debilitating nature of his physical condition and the hopelessness of his situation. Me Before You is the sort of story that makes you think not only about living a better, fuller life but also what a gift it is to love and be loved in a manner that makes you want to be better. Jojo Moyes shows us Louisa being underestimated by everyone around her and how that, combined with childhood trauma, made diffidence her whole personality. Until Will, and her love for him show her what she’s capable of.   Sadly, there’s a reason why Louisa’s been employed for only six months and therein lies her challenge. Will’s character makes the point that a life not lived to its fullest potential is not a life worth living.   Since I read Me Before You more than a decade after it was first published in 2012 and many years after the release of the film adaptation starring Emilia Clark and Sam Claflin, I’m aware of the debate about assisted suicide and euthanasia it stirred up. This novel caused many to question the message it was sending severely-disabled people and their loved ones. It lies with each individual reader to make up their own mind about it.

The case of Captain Alfred Dreyfus’ inhumane imprisonment following his wrongful conviction in 1894 is infamous in the records of world history. The Dreyfus Affair is widely acknowledged as an absolute sham of a court martial, adjudged on the basis of flimsy circumstantial evidence, in the hope that it would look like justice when it was really just a fig leaf for antisemitism and dereliction of duty. Robert Harris’ An Officer and A Spy  is about that case and the two men at its centre—the first, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Mulhouse Jew serving in the French Army who is found guilty of a crime he did not commit and imprisoned most cruelly on Devil’s Island; and second, Major (later Colonel) Georges Picquart, a man of rare integrity and courage who stood up to the entire French establishment to right a wrong at great risk to his career, reputation and liberty. An Officer and A Spy  is an engrossing retelling of a riveting story, taking the reader through the initial court martial of Captain Dreyfus in 1894, right up to the culmination of the case in 1906. In a clever touch, Harris makes Picquart the narrator of the story, allowing the reader to view the facts of the case as they emerge and be a party to Picquart’s dilemma and finally, conversion from being yet another believer in Dreyfus’ guilt to becoming his staunchest defender. Robert Harris opens the novel with Major Picquart narrating to the Minister of War, General Auguste Mercier and the Chief of General Staff, General Boisdeffre, what he witnessed at Captain Dreyfus’ military degradation in public view for treason, on charges of passing on military documents and secrets to a foreign power which, though unnamed, is understood to be Germany. The author establishes Picquart as a man of great intelligence with a flair for words and a knack for knowing what his audience wants to hear. And it is through Major Picquart’s astute point of view that we are introduced to each character. His descriptions are both discerning and entertaining pen pictures of the main players, combining both his keen observation skills and understanding of human psychology. While describing a French officer with delusions of grandeur, Picquart says, “I always found something disconcerting about du Paty. It was as if he were acting the central part in a play for which no one else had been shown the script. He might laugh abruptly, or tap his nose and adopt an air of great mystery, or disappear from a room in the middle of a conversation without explanation. He fancied himself a detective in the modern scientific manner… I wondered what role in his drama he had chosen for me to play.” An Officer and A Spy  evokes an image of Paris as a hub of culture which it was, but also adds a strain of a defeated France, still licking its wounds after a resounding defeat by the Germans in 1870. The stench of a military humiliation permeates the entire novel and Harris conveys well the desperation of the defeated to find someone to blame and victimise almost as an antidote for its own defeat. The inciting incident of the novel is Major Picquart, having played a role in the arrest and conviction of Captain Dreyfus, being promoted to the rank of Colonel and appointed chief of the counter-espionage unit called, in a coup of boring names, the Statistical Section. It is in this role that Colonel Picquart is forced to revisit the Dreyfus case and question whether or not the Army caught the right man. As Picquart uncovers sinister lies and conspiracies, his faith in the incorruptibility of the organisation he is devoted to, is shaken, causing him to question even his own character and motivations. The novel’s key themes of nationalism and ambition versus integrity play out in court as well as in Picquart’s mind, knowing as he does that pursuing this case would destroy his career and likely end in a court martial for him and social ruin for those he loves. When facing disciplinary action himself, Picquart muses, “In this quasi-religious house I perceive that I have become something beyond a mere dangerous nuisance to my masters. I am a heretic to the faith.” Harris is masterful at depicting the sky-high stakes of the political scandal that shook Europe, weaving in the rising antisemitism, the grubby journalism of the scandal sheets as well as the tenacious activism of staunch supporters of Dreyfus’ cause like Anatole France, Henri Poincaré and Georges Clemenceau. At the height of the scandal, Émile Zola wrote, in a French daily, an explosive open letter known quite simply as J’accuse…! , accusing high-ranking officers and ministers of colluding in the wrongful conviction and imprisonment of Captain Dreyfus. An Officer and A Spy  is not a quick read but Harris keeps it pacy even though it must be said there are portions in the middle that focus rather minutely on procedure. However, I suppose that is to be expected in a novel about a real-life case with many fine details and a multitude of characters. While history must be credited with providing the plot of this novel, Harris enhances it with a narrative structure that keeps ticking and a well-rounded narrator. Picquart is a man of culture with his interests in literature and music highlighted throughout the book bestowing him with an air of gentler sensibilities and a sense of humour offset by a few flaws of character making him feel like a real person instead of a bookish paragon of goodness. In a lighter moment, he muses on the status of older bachelors, “Bachelors of forty are society’s stray cats. We are taken in by households and fed and made a fuss of; in return we are expected to provide amusement, submit with good grace…however short the notice.” All in all, I greatly enjoyed An Officer and A Spy . If espionage thrillers and historical dramas are your scene, then do pick this one up. If, however, you prefer watching over reading, you could check out its film adaptation directed by Roman Polanski.

Many of us have been taught history, economics and politics through somewhat incomplete and at times, inaccurate stories of cause and effect highlighting the role of great individuals and exceptional happenings. With The Evolution of Everything, Matt Ridley intends to show us how almost everything around us is a result of a bottom-up, gradual evolutionary process. This book's strength lies in the ideas it throws up, causing us to re-examine and rethink the way the world works, grows and changes. Ridley makes the point that much of recorded history, “places far too much emphasis on design, direction and planning, and far too little on evolution.” In separate chapters devoted to the evolution of varied fields such as government, morality, education, population, money, etc, Ridley lays out his primary thesis, that changes in all these spheres are incremental, inexorable, gradual and spontaneous. And quite often, this slow evolution is not visible to the casual observer who may have trained his or her eyes on larger-than-life personalities or organizations expecting them to be the founts of change. Ridley writes, “Much of the human world is the result of human action, but not of human design; it emerges from the interactions of millions, not from the plans of a few." Ridley states that things which survive and thrive are a result of bottom-up evolution, created without any active decision towards making a change, be it the evolution of all living things, industrialisation, religion or language. No one person or entity created or caused them and yet, here they are… all in working order. Furthermore, Matt Ridley makes the point that top-down policy-making is a recipe for disaster since it is prescriptive without fully understanding any issue in addition to not allowing for the rough-tumble of the real world to separate the wheat from the chaff in the dustbowl of ideas. Ridley leans heavily on Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution to support his view. For me, the most compelling chapters were about the evolution of morality, culture and technology. Ridley illustrates the concept of nothing being able to stop an idea whose time has come with an example of the light bulb and Edison: “Suppose Thomas Edison had died of an electric shock before thinking up the electric bulb. Would history have been radically different? Of course not. Somebody else would have come up with the idea. Others did. Where I live, we tend to call the Newcastle hero Joseph Swan the inventor of the incandescent bulb, and we are not wrong… In Russia, they credit Alexander Lodygin. In fact, there are no fewer than twenty-three people who deserve the credit for inventing some version of the incandescent bulb before Edison.” The Evolution of Everything sets off to cast aside confirmation bias, the Great Man theory and mostly, the dusty idea of top-down policy-making. Unfortunately, Ridley isn’t very convincing in all chapters. The chapters about leadership and economy are especially crippled by the very thing The Evolution of Everything  is so determined to expose – confirmation bias and the desire to fit cherry-picked events into pre-determined theories about the world and how it works. Ridley states that one of the chief characteristics of an untrustworthy theory is that it is not refutable. Some of his own ideas and versions of events share that characteristic. More specifically, in the chapter about the evolution of the money, Ridley writes that the 2008 Recession was caused more by the top-down policies of the Clinton and Bush administrations rather than bottom-up deregulation (such as the repealing of the Glass-Steagall Act which separated commercial and investment banking activities). He also mentions, in passing, his own exposure to the 2008 Global Financial Crisis . “My own experience as chairman of a bank was of endless reassurance from intrusive and detailed regulation right up till the point when it all went wrong. Far from warning of the crisis to come, regulators did the very opposite, and gave false reassurance or emphasised the wrong risks.” It's a pity that he doesn’t mention that in September 2007, Northern Rock (the bank he was chairman of) became the first British bank since 1878 to suffer a run on its finances . And it’s not like he followed the libertarian, ‘survival of the fittest’ credo when his bank was sinking. Instead, Northern Rock applied to the  Bank of England  for emergency liquidity funding at the beginning of the crisis, but failed. Ridley resigned as chairman in October 2007. In February 2008,  Northern Rock was nationalised following a bailout by the UK government .  A parliamentary committee criticised Ridley for not recognising the risks of the bank's financial strategy and "harming the reputation of the British banking industry". But the 'bottom-up' £27 billion failure of Northern Rock and its 'top-down' rescue don’t find a mention in The Evolution of Everything . That's confirmation bias and ideological blindness at its peak. I suppose, that is to be expected when an author is cherry-picking examples and anecdotes to prop up a theory that springs interesting questions and explains some things but not everything. I found it surprising that there is no mention of China's economic revolution in the chapter about economy just as Singapore's visionary leader, Lee Kuan Yew, viewed as 'authoritarian' by the West, is ignored in the chapter about leadership. Ridley wishes to make the point that top-down policies are always failures and these two examples amongst many others don't suit his narrative.   The American author, F Scott Fitzgerald is reported to have said, “The truest sign of intelligence is the ability to entertain two contradictory ideas simultaneously.” I dare say, it is also a sign of a genuine spirit of inquiry and grace which, sadly, is lacking in The Evolution of Everything . As  a result, it becomes a rather tedious read by the end.

I watched Netflix’s Persuasion last week. It is based on Jane Austen’s last novel, Persuasion , in terms of the broad plot and the Regency aesthetic – which seems to have been Netflix’s sole reason for going ahead with this adaptation, given the success of the Bridgerton series . In keeping with the wokeness of our times, Netflix brings in actors of diverse backgrounds (of African and Malaysian origin) to play characters that were written as white and English. This is another Bridgerton effect, I suppose. I haven’t read the Bridgerton series but did watch the first two seasons of the show. The author of the romance series, Julia Quinn wrote it in the early 2000s. I can only assume that Julia Quinn is fine with Shonda Rimes, the executive producer of the show, reimagining the Regency Era with more racially and culturally diverse characters. That’s great. Jane Austen, on the other hand, had no such ideas, given that she was writing of that time in that time. Also, she didn’t have a twitter (now christened X) account! COLOUR BLIND OR CONFLICT-AVOIDANT? I get it. Regency fashion is a vibe at the moment and so, the folks at Netflix thought any drivel in those outfits is likely to be a hit with the demographic that watches Bridgerton. What they seem to have forgotten or perhaps never realised is that literature is more than an aesthetic. In fact, even aesthetics are more than an aesthetic. They are, more often than not, a reflection of social, religious, political and economic factors. Don’t buy my statement? Think about why we dress differently from the way that our grandparents did. To ‘modernise’ characters to better fit our current ideals and soothe our sensibilities rather than reflect the truth of the period depicted is a form of dumbing down. Not only because it assumes that the viewers wouldn’t understand the social mores of the era in question but also because it attempts to fool its victim (the viewer, in this case) into mistaking this screening of facts as a symbol of their power to alter the public discourse. To gloss over historical wrongs (as in the case of slavery or colonialism) is not just factually incorrect but also escapist. Does pretending that injustices that occurred centuries ago didn’t happen make our present-day world a fairer place? What’s next? A white Nelson Mandela in a remake of Invictus ? Or does ‘colour-blindness’ not work in that direction? If so, then perhaps we should re-examine its efficacy. I know there is a stereotype of Generation Z and Millennials being conflict-avoidant but this has got to be a new level of avoidance. History, I’m afraid, doesn’t come with trigger warnings. Not at least, in the real world. WHERE IS THE REAL ANNE ELLIOT? Despite my obvious irritation at the ineffectual and token inclusiveness of diverse or colour-blind casting in dramas set in periods of history when race was practically destiny, the aspect of Netflix's Persuasion that baffled me most was the characterization of the protagonist, Anne Elliot. In Jane Austen’s novel, she is a somewhat plain-looking, quiet and melancholy aristocratic woman with a rich internal life. A wallflower with more intelligence, fortitude and kindness than she gets credit for. Unmarried at 27, Anne believes that life has passed her by and worse still, she’s to blame for it. We are told that eight years ago, she broke her engagement to a man she loved, Frederick Wentworth who, at the time, lacked both status and wealth as an ordinary naval officer. The sadness and guilt that followed the end of that relationship has been a heavy burden that Anne has borne in silence and without any real confidants. The passage of time has only deepened her feelings for Wentworth and sharpened her regret at having allowed herself to be persuaded to abandon a love worth fighting for. Jane Austen puts it best, “She had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as she grew older: the natural sequel of an unnatural beginning.” This character in Netflix's film is portrayed by Dakota Johnson who, I’m quite sure isn’t anyone’s idea of plain-looking. But that’s a minor niggle compared to the assault of the ‘feisty woman’ trope that so many filmmakers and showrunners are determined to foist upon us. I wish someone could get a memo to folks in the entertainment business that every female character cannot be feisty, outspoken and given to enacting rambunctious impressions of naval captains, complete with jam moustaches (yes, I know, this a spoiler but it was a spoiler for me too. In a different way though). Jane Austen was a master of characterisation and like any good author, many of her plots develop from the interactions between her characters and their circumstances. Change the character and the outcome cannot be the same. I find it hilarious that Netflix executives don’t understand that characters in stories (at least, good ones) have agency and purpose within the plot and aren’t interchangeable. What’s next? Anna Karenina as a chirpy soccer mom? I shudder to think. In Persuasion , Anne is in the situation she is in because she lacked the conviction and boldness to not be persuaded by a person whose opinion she valued. If she was as feisty and strong-willed as Wentworth said she was (in the film, not the book), then why did she not marry him in the first place? That way, there would’ve been no movie. And that, in itself, would have been no mean achievement, I promise you. A WENTWORTH WITHOUT MYSTERY Further on in the story, we are told that Wentworth’s sister and her husband, Admiral Croft would be renting the Elliot home, Kellynch Hall (due to Anne’s father’s diminished finances and consequent move to Bath). As expected, Captain Wentworth also shows up on the scene soon enough. His prospects have improved drastically over the years, making him an eligible match. For the rest, you’ll have to order yourself a copy of the book. Or catch the film, at your own risk! One of the major elements of suspense in Austen's Persuasion is what Wentworth thinks or how he feels about Anne eight years after she called off their engagement. In the novel, both Anne and the reader are equally in the dark. The film ruins that suspense by injecting a strange chat between the protagonists on a beach. Hence, when at the climax of the film, Wentworth writes Anne a letter (which ranks amongst the greatest love letters in English literature) professing his feelings, it doesn’t have quite the same impact because the build-up to it has, frankly, been punctured. FILTERING MELANCHOLY Persuasion is a story of true love lost and the regret it leaves in its wake. So, it’s not hard to imagine that melancholy would be the presiding mood of the novel. Jane Austen achieved this by using free indirect discourse in which a third person narrator often views things from the protagonist’s perspective and weaves their insights and thoughts into the narrative. But it’s done so subtly that you might forget it is happening at all. Austen also balanced her satire of societal norms and Anne’s silly relatives with an underlying current of loss and sadness, mirroring Anne’s state of mind. Netflix's efforts in this direction seem limited to using a colour palette that reminded me of a blue-toned Instagram filter. It looked nice but that’s all it was - style over substance. KNOCKING DOWN THE FOURTH WALL With respect to weaving in Anne’s perspective, the makers of Netflix's Persuasion took a chance with having her speak straight to the audience. I can understand their reasons for doing that. One of the challenges of film-making or any visual medium is to show what someone thinks or feels. Novels have omniscient or close third person narrators or even first person point of view where readers can literally read the character’s mind. Film-making doesn’t have that advantage. A technique to make up for that lack is for a character to directly address the audience by breaking the fourth wall . The term ‘fourth wall’ originated in theatre. It refers to the imaginary wall between the characters of a play in their fictional world and the audience. In Netflix's Persuasion , Anne Elliot speaks directly to the viewers as if they were her confidants. It’s been done earlier, of course. An example I can think of at the moment, is Kevin Spacey’s character, Francis Underwood, in House of Cards . That was a masterclass. This, on the other hand, is detention! It fails mainly because the movie Anne continues to sound chirpy and upbeat (even in this intimate exchange with her confidant, the viewer) in a story about a woman who is in the depths of misery at the prospect of watching her lost love find love with another in front of her very eyes. I’m sure you, dear reader, see the incongruity of it all. I imagine that the screenplay writers and the director probably thought this could be their way of giving us, the viewers an insight into Anne’s inner world. Sadly, snarky and almost witty comments don’t do much to evoke sympathy for Anne’s character in the film. PERSUASION’S THEMES: MISSING IN ACTION Jane Austen’s Persuasion revolves around the themes of constancy in love, regret and transformation brought on by love and regret. In the film, we don’t see that kind of constancy, no regret other than surly references to being ‘worse than exes’ and certainly, no transformation in the Anne’s character. You could be forgiven for thinking of her as a single-note character. GET A CLUE In conclusion, I hope the failure of this venture for Netflix wakes them up to the consequences of jumping onto the bandwagon of a megahit success i.e. Bridgerton and churning out lazy and soulless adaptations of beloved classics in the hope that their target demographic won’t catch on. Next time, instead of focussing only on keeping the empire waistline (a staple of Regency era fashion), perhaps Netflix could stay loyal to what the story is about. If all else fails, they could pick up a clue or two from Clueless . The makers of that film adapted Jane Austen’s Emma and set it in a high school in contemporary Los Angeles, complete with cellphones and designer outfits. Starring an effervescent Alicia Silverstone, Brittany Murphy and Paul Rudd, Clueless had a diverse cast, all while staying faithful to Austen’s characterization and the spirit of the novel, making the film a cult classic. Watch and learn, Netflix!

This is a novel about ghosts of the past haunting one’s present. The protagonist of A Stain on the Silence is James who has a good job and a wife he adores. The story is narrated in first person by James takes us through his comfortable suburban life being jolted by a revelation made by Lily Murthington, a former lover whom he hasn’t heard from in 24 years. Lily tells him that their affair from when he was a teenager and she, the step-mother of his school friend, Carlo, resulted in a daughter, Kate. Laid up in a hospice, practically on her deathbed, Lily pleads with James to help Kate avoid going to prison for the murder of her boyfriend. Does James help? Yes, of course, else this would be a very slim book. But there’s a weightier reason for his assistance. James has a secret of his own - one he’d like to take to his grave. However, Lily has evidence that would destroy that plan. As far as set-ups go, this is fairly sufficient but somehow, the unlikeable characters and the unnecessary running about makes A Stain on the Silence feel like a wasted opportunity. It’s a story that is unable to choose between being plot-driven and character-driven. With its bleak outlook and almost every major character from James, Lily, Kate to Carlo being either a liar, manipulative or violent, A Stain on the Silence lacks an emotional centre which readers would identify with. In addition, there are parts where the action in this story comes across as solely a means to etch out a character profile and perhaps, justify the end. The theme of broken families, childhood friendship and deceit in everyday life are never fully explored. I’ve read one other novel by Andrew Taylor called The Scent of Death  which is an atmospheric and layered story set during the American Revolution with characters who, though complex have real-life motivations and are decidedly more relatable. Unlike characters in A Stain on the Silence  who do cruel things and yet carry themselves with the air of injured sparrows. The constant flashbacks in James’ narrative are overwrought and feel false since he holds back crucial pieces of information from the reader for no reason other than to spring a somewhat soggy surprise in the final chapters. Taylor manages to drum up some pace towards the end of the novel by revealing a twist in the final lines of almost every chapter but they left me cold. Arguably, the ending or pay-off at the end of the story in a thriller or mystery, more than any other genre perhaps, is what makes the book. And that is, sadly, A Stain on the Silence’s greatest letdown. It’s an ending so timid and half-baked that I was left looking to turn a few more pages. It’s open-ended with no real resolution of guilt and the reader is left wondering about the real motivations for certain characters’ actions in the climax. The last chapter of A Stain on the Silence  left me with a sense of reading a book which has had its last few pages ripped out.

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.