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 the 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 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.

I watched Netflix’s Persuasion last week. It's 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 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 precisely 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 (thanks to the diminished finances of Anne's father and their consequent move to Bath). As expected, Captain Wentworth 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. And so when, in the film's climax, 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 Persuasion and the folks at Netflix took a chance with having Dakota 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 or regret. The most we get are 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!

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 cherishing 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.

You know it’s a rare day when you come across a page-turner about economics written by an economist-turned-politician. In the spirit of full disclosure, you should know that I enjoy books that get clubbed under the genre of economics made fun or pop economics whether it’s Freakonomics and its ‘super’ sibling, Malcolm Gladwell’s bestsellers like Blink and The Outliers or Thomas L Friedman’s more intensive The World is Flat and That used to be Us. Try not to hold this against me! I like what they set out to do – to answer questions about our world. Some of which are related to money while others are about power and access. But more than the answers, what fascinates me are the questions the writers ask and the varied paths they take to arrive at the answers. Yanis Varoufakis poses one such question – Why did the British invade Australia instead of the Aboriginals landing up in London? His answer takes us back 12,000 years to the ‘invention’ of agriculture. Could it be that the seeds of colonialism were strewn by humans starving in parts of Europe and Asia due to a scarcity of food? Many millennia later, the surplus of food that comes from the growing of grain created a ruling class, clergy and ships amongst other things. All of this and a compass made in China gave us global trade. Compare this to the Aboriginals Down Under. A relatively small population with exclusive access to the plentiful flora and fauna of an entire continent meant that they never ran short and so, didn’t need to grow their own food. As a result, they stuck to painting and music in their free time. Varoufakis uses this and many other examples from the long arc of human history to illustrate how necessity is the mother of invention and ultimately, an engine for growth. Originally written in Varoufakis’ native Greek in 2013, Talking to My Daughter About the Economy was translated into English in 2017. Writing as he does with his young daughter in mind, he sets out to explain how market economies or capitalism came to be, why there is so much financial inequality in the world, the inseverable links between debt and profit, how labour and money markets work in counter-intuitive ways and why bankers exist. All good questions, in my opinion. However, these are also questions that could have sleep-inducing answers. I wouldn’t blame you for imagining the horrors of a PowerPoint presentation but stay with me. This is different. Fortunately for me and anyone else who takes on this book, Varoufakis makes his points in simple language using real-life examples with not a bar graph or pie chart in sight. I especially revelled in his obvious fondness for story-telling ­­-- dipping into Greek mythology with tales of Icarus and Oedipus sprinkled in along with references to literary classics like Frankenstein and Doctor Faustus to illustrate the pitfalls of unbridled technology and to explain how usury went from being a sin to an integral part of everyday life. Cult classics like The Matrix, Blade Runner and Star Trek make a cameo too, reflecting the conscious and subliminal concerns of people like us, living in an age of increasing mechanization and commercialisation. Varoufakis delves into how the last few centuries witnessed the transformation of 'societies with markets' into market societies. And how, for the most part, exchange value has trumped experiential value in the race that is capitalism. When you think about it, this change touches all aspects of our lives - from what we choose to study, how much time we have to indulge in our hobbies to where we live. For all its positives, I do have one grouse. I’m afraid Talking to My Daughter about the Economy tends to be Euro-centric and some of its deductions too generalised to withstand the test of varied examples. For instance, if surplus is considered a fundamental sign of an economy, then I can understand why the natives of Australia and the indigenous communities in South America didn’t have the means to colonise other countries. What doesn’t sync, however, is why a country like India, with its flourishing trade-links and an economy that amounted to about a quarter of the world’s GDP in the 1700s, never ventured out to Europe, the Americas or Africa? Setting aside my minor quibbles about how a 200-page book doesn’t take into account all of world history, I would concede that it still does a good job of what I suppose, was its primary aim – to make economics interesting and more accessible. After all, here is an economist stating that economists are ‘almost always wrong’ and exhorting the rest of us to take the reins of these matters into our own hands and make better choices. All in all, if you’re someone who thinks that economics is too dull to bother with, replete with jargon and best left to those who care about these things, Talking to My Daughter about the Economy is the book for you. It feels like a boisterous and engaging class discussion with Varoufakis being the kind of teacher everyone wishes they had.

Have you ever broken into a sweat at the thought of attending a meeting or even going to work, reached for a bottle of water with trembling hands and experienced an acute feeling of isolation and loneliness? Or just been enveloped in a cloud of dread that sucks the joy out of any situation, infusing it with the drab colours of pessimism? You could be suffering from anxiety or the effects of exposure to long term stress. Anxiety changes you in ways that you didn’t imagine possible or logical. And everything feels 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 the one time. 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 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. After all, zebras have their share of stress. They need to look for food and water while trying to not get eaten by a lion also looking for food. 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 in the present is bad enough, but the anticipation and trepidation of stressful situations in the future 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. 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. We can, however, choose to reduce our exposure to our stressors in certain cases, and adopt healthy practices to act as antidotes to deal with those we can’t avoid. And most importantly, live in the present, like zebras do.

The Plot is a novel about Jacob Finch Bonner, a struggling writer who, frustrated with his dwindling status and its attending indignities, steals an absolutely riveting plot narrated to him by a student who dies before completing his novel based on the same plot. Jacob’s book ends up becoming a blockbuster and he, a celebrated author. Life is good as a best-selling author with cross-country promotional tours, talk of his novel being made into a movie and the promise of a hefty cheque for his next novel. There is, however, one tiny fly in the ointment - someone knows his secret and is threatening to reveal it to the world. Jean Hanff Korelitz paints a brilliant portrait of an unsympathetic protagonist with no major redeeming traits and a fair number of affectations – starting with the pretentiousness of his self-given middle name ‘Finch’ in a nod to Atticus Finch from Harper Lee’s classic To Kill a Mockingbird. With this little touch, Korelitz shows us not only his vanity but also places, in his very name, his antithesis. Atticus Finch has been deified in the pages of literature as the epitome of integrity and fortitude - traits Jacob sorely lacks. The feigned modesty of Jacob’s carefully curated but seemingly off-the-cuff “famous author is an oxymoron” quip and his lack of interest in anyone’s life apart from his own doesn’t do much to bolster his likeability. However, that is also what makes him believable because he is so painfully ordinary even at the heights that he has managed to scale. The Plot explores the theme of what defines originality in art which is as good as stated in its epigraph – “Good writers borrow, great writers steal.” The fact that even these six words are attributed to both TS Eliot and Oscar Wilde is apt and poetic. By eschewing the benefits of a sympathetic protagonist, The Plot by Jean Hanff Korelitz is made stronger because its inquiry into the blurry line separating inspiration from plagiarism, is forced to stand on its own merit instead of being held up by an affable main character. Readers are often willing to forgive likeable or sympathetic characters some fairly heinous acts. Don’t believe me? Just ask Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights, Lisbeth Salander from The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Rodion Raskolnikov from Crime and Punishment. You’d probably get wry nods of agreement from them. Sadly for Jacob, he is not a character that inspires that sort of clemency. The only saving grace for Jacob is that his antagonist is much worse than him – a fact that is revealed slowly and becomes more horrifying as you turn the pages. The writing is engaging and the narrator’s turn of phrase and ironic tone elevates the story, injecting it with humour and insight while also allowing the reader to maintain a psychic distance from the protagonist. The exposition, in the initial chapters, of Richard Peng Hall and the history of Ripley College sets the tone for Jake’s dismal life post his shot at literary fame. Some readers might be put off by the lack of action in the protagonist’s decidedly downward spiral from a “new and noteworthy” author to a part-time professor at a third-rate college to the glorified administrator of a writer’s resort. To me, however, showing Jacob’s worsening circumstances is important to establish his reasons for doing what he does. It’s his ambition combined with his descent into that special hell of impecuniosity and professional irrelevance that forges his motivation to steal his former student’s story idea. The plot of the novel is somewhat predictable since I guessed the two main twists - the climactic revelation in Jacob’s book and the identity of his blackmailer. In the end, what stayed with me was the theme of the novel – what constitutes originality? After all, even Disney’s The Lion King is a rendition of Shakespeare’s Hamlet but surely, we wouldn’t call it an act of plagiarism. I am reminded of a quote I read many years ago, “Ideas are nobody’s property. They belong to whoever expresses them best.” Finally, as anyone who has studied the craft of writing fiction will tell you, there are only seven basic narrative plots in all of storytelling which operate as scaffoldings in the construction of all stories. However, the myriad details of setting, characterisation, motivations, conflicts and narrative style make them individual pieces of expression. So, is Jacob’s novel his own work or plagiarised in its entirety? Read The Plot and let me know what you think.

There are days when nothing seems to go right. Perhaps you had an argument with a co-worker or a loved one or missed out on something you were looking forward to. We all know that it happens to everyone and whatever has irked us probably won’t matter in the long run but that knowledge doesn’t always soothe. The irritation of jangled nerves still prickles. I have a few remedies I use almost every time I find myself stuck in a bad day like that. They have all been effective and none are to be considered better than the other. In fact, I’ve often used them in combination. The first among equals is listening to music that I enjoy, preferably perky with an up-tempo beat. First, just listening and eventually, singing along to familiar songs can brighten the gloomiest moods. Maybe songs just stir up memories of happier times. Taking a shower as soon as I get home is another tip. Especially on days when I would return from work in a dark mood and even a harmless comment from my brother could spark a full-fledged battle given my state of mind. Instead, going straight up to my room, dropping my bag and jumping into the shower was the best thing to do. There’s something therapeutic about letting cool or warm water (depending on the weather) wash away the day's weariness while the gentle fragrance of a shower gel being lathered with a loofah soothes fatigued muscles. Even more relaxing is the scalp massage that accompanies washing one’s hair. Just standing under the shower head with water flowing over you is calming. As is the sound of water. I can say with assurance that you’ll step out in a better mood than when you went in. The third remedy is to go for a walk. It helps burn off the agitated energy of an angsty day. Depending on where you live, stepping out for a walk may mean different things. In Delhi, it meant the paved lanes of a gated colony for me. Thankfully, it was quiet and there were quite a few trees and I would often meet the neighbourhood dogs. Here in Belgaum, it’s more scenic but harder on my feet. A rough mud track pitted with stones running alongside fields of corn, cabbage, sugarcane, chillies or rice, depending on the season. The rays of the setting sun over fields flush with vegetation while others lie fallow, resting in deep, brown furrows. And the breeze, cool and blowing unhindered. And of course, at least one or two of our dogs come along for company. Sometimes, I like to sit by the river that flows through the fields and watch shepherds grazing their sheep. No treadmill can match that feeling. Walking alongside paddy fields with Cindy Going for a walk is also an opportunity to commune with nature. Now, I’m not under the mistaken impression that most people are walking through some kind of mystical forest when they go for a walk. Sadly, it’s usually a tarmac road between rows of buildings. But if you have the chance, take a walk in a park or along a path that has some trees or plants. It’ll make all the difference. There’s something deeply healing about walking in nature. Perhaps, we pick up nature’s unhurried ways subliminally. I believe the Japanese have a word for it – shinrinyoku, which when translated, broadly means ‘forest bath’ or taking a walk in the forest for its restorative benefits. To see nature at work in the shrinking of a touch-me-not, the falling leaves of a tree or a squirrel saving up nuts for the winter is calming in its predictability but also in the endless hope that nature offers all its creations. Things pan out just fine. Even tiny plants with their minute flowers bloom even though they can’t compete with oak trees. A tree shorn of all its leaves isn’t worried about the future. The leaves will return, come spring. And the squirrel will live through the winter even if it drops a nut or two on its way home. And none of this need to be thought of, consciously. It just seeps in. A kind of osmosis. The last of my tried and tested remedies is to go to bed early. My reasoning being that if I’m having a bad day, why prolong it? Going to bed a little earlier than usual helps me grab some extra and much-needed shuteye with the additional benefit of no longer having to think unhappy thoughts of what ruined my day in the first place in addition to side-stepping the risk of making it worse. The next morning, things are invariably brighter, both literally and metaphorically.

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. Quite 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 atop 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 changes turned out to be key transition points. These 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 few days ago, a couple of friends were giving me a hard time for being a Manchester United supporter because they think it a somewhat hackneyed choice given the massive following the club commands. It seemed to them like I just decided to support the first jersey I spotted in the English Premier League. Come to think of it, even if that was the way it came to pass, I wouldn’t admit to it, would I? However, happily for me, that's not the reason for my continued loyalty to the Red Devils. As it happened, my regard for the club was forged in a moment of great disappointment for the football giant. Eleven years ago, I watched Manchester United lose out on the Premier League trophy by a whisker in one of the most thrilling title-chases in recent history. In case you weren't watching or had other fish to fry on the 13th of May, 2012, it would suffice to say that when the final whistle blew in the Manchester United match, they won and were champions of the league for a full thirty seconds! That's when their noisy neighbours, Manchester City, crashed the party with two blistering goals in extra time, amd marched off with the trophy. Now if that doesn't convince you of the exhilarating rollercoaster ride football can be, then not much else will. I, for one, was sucked right in. I was struck not just by the fickle ways of the Gods of Football but also by United's grace in defeat and the steadfastness of a club that didn't necessarily have the bountiful coffers (despite popular perception) to buy their way to the best team. Instead, they believed in tradition, discipline and investing in home-grown talent honed by a manager whose name is known even to people who wouldn't know when the last World Cup was held. So ultimately, I support MUFC not just because they're majestic in victory but because, even in the dying minutes of a game they're losing terribly, you can never count them out. After all, not for nothing was the phrase 'Fergie time' coined to reflect the scintillating energy that results in a tremendous number of late goals scored by Manchester United sides in the final moments of a game. To keep playing as if you could change a loss into a win even when the odds are stacked against you is the United way and they continue to do just that, often enough to inspire the legend and the dream. And isn't that what all sport is about? Forget sport, that's got life written all over it. And for that reason, Manchester United shall always have my support.

Confession – I’m a fairly regular watcher of morning and evening routine videos on YouTube regardless of the qualifier or adjective du jour. Common trends include ‘that girl’, ‘realistic’, ‘productive’ or ‘relaxed’. Despite the differentiators, it’s usually the same. Not just the aesthetic of rooms painted white with lots of natural light, a few houseplants, coffee from Keurig or Nespresso coffee machines, colour-coordinated gym wear and skin care that would give Cleopatra an inferiority complex! The routines themselves are fairly basic and yet, I like watching them because they can be inspiring even in their artifice. To be fair, one can pick up a few good ideas like making a to-do list for the day (helps with productivity) or making your bed within the first ten minutes of waking up (checks the temptation to crawl back in). In fact, I learnt the recipe for my favourite chocolate banana oats smoothie from a morning routine video. Night routines are even more movie-like and mellow since they are geared toward winding down for the night. It’s so cosy you can practically smell the cookies baking in the oven. There are, of course, cliches galore – candles, cleaning up spaces before going to bed, cooking a healthy but still Instagram-worthy dinner, luxurious bubble baths followed by, you guessed it, skin care! Somewhere in the mix is also some peppermint tea in a cutesy mug. You might wonder why I watch them if I find them so predictable. Well, because even what is formulaic can be enjoyable and relaxing. Just think of your favourite comfort food. Never fails to hit the spot, does it? While I do allow myself a chuckle or two at how all YouTubers seem to have the pretty much the same taste, I do enjoy seeing how most of the humdrum tasks that all of us perform during our days can be made more enjoyable. Also, I like the element of self-care that all these videos invariably serve up. Self-care can be anything from a walk in the park, to journaling or a sipping a drink sitting in your favourite chair. I’m not the kind of person who has an elaborate daily routine but I see the value in taking some time every day to take a break and doing something I enjoy. When I was working, I would take this break sometime in the middle of my office hours. Nothing beats a coffee in my book! Working in the television news business, my shifts could change almost daily. Fortunately, I would have an hour’s break after a few hours of working and in one of those breaks I would walk down to a coffee shop half a mile from my office. Sometimes, I'd go with a colleague or friend but most of the time, it was just me and a book. I would order my usual frappe and a sandwich if I was hungry, sink into a couch and read for about half an hour before I walked back to the office. This break, spent in the world of a fictional character, afforded me some quiet time away from the shrill of breaking news and the general sense of rushing about that permeates newsrooms. Stepping away from my work environment helped me recharge and come back refreshed. I understand that most people don’t have the luxury of such long breaks (with even a lunch break being considered a privilege) at their workplaces but the point I’m making is about how essential it is to step away from your desk or work station or even housework to indulge in an activity that relaxes and rejuvenates you, even if it is only for a few minutes. So if you can, take a walk while you listen to a song you like, read a few pages of a book, do the crossword or a sudoku, chat with a friend or just sit in a quiet corner and breathe. Life can be mundane yet hectic but a change of pace can make a difference.

The Truth about the Harry Quebert Affair is a cold case whodunnit delivered with literary flair. The plot takes you through many hairpin bends while the form and style of the writing make the ride pleasurable rather than merely efficient. Broadly, it is a book about two authors – Harry Quebert, a celebrated author arrested for murder, 33 years after a fifteen-year-old girl that he loved 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. Setting aside the brief excerpt from a 911 call establishing the fifteen-year-old Nola’s disappearance, the book opens with a prologue depicting Marcus’ life post the best-selling success of his second book. It introduces us to Marcus as the protagonist and narrator. This opening also sets up the basic questions readers are likely to ask about the story that is yet to unfold, focussing majorly on the whodunnit aspect. A shift from the usual is the numbering of the chapters as a countdown starting from 31 down to 1, building anticipation and setting off a subtle ticking clock in the reader’s mind. Dicker also uses a little graphic of a rectangle at the beginning of each chapter that denotes how much of the story has been read. That didn't appear to be of any major significance to me apart from being a design element. The Truth about the Harry Quebert Affair is structured into two timelines. The first is the year 2008 which follows the discovery of the dead body, the ensuing murder case and the writing of Marcus’ second novel. The second thread is from 1975 – and the events around the disappearance of the fifteen-year-old Nola. There is the added element of excerpts from the book that Marcus is writing. To his credit, Dicker is flawless when it comes to signposting the setting and period that the characters are in, within the first few lines of each section. Not once in this 615-page book is the reader left scratching their head wondering where they are in the timeline of events. That’s no mean feat given the complex structure of the novel. As a novel within a novel, The Truth about the Harry Quebert Affair casts a sidelong glance at the cut-throat business of publishing and the kind of machinations that go into creating a buzz around a bestseller. Dicker portrays these tips and tricks of the business as a prism of spin that can refract even a faux pas into appearing like the glimmer of genius. An exchange between Marcus, the young writer and his cynical publisher on the conflict between freedom and economics is thought-provoking. In contrast, the teacher-student relationship between Harry and Marcus is concentrated mainly on the craft of writing. Each chapter begins with an excerpt of the mentor talking to his protégé about writing, boxing or life. Joel Dicker weaves the political landscape of the United States in 2008 into the story giving it a sense of not unfolding in a vacuum. Since the political events that culminated in Obama’s historic victory are well-known to most readers, this device is effective without requiring too much space in exposition. The three main characters – Marcus, Harry and Nola are dynamic and develop throughout the length of the novel. Most of the secondary characters are not one-note characters either and more importantly, have their own motivations. This creates several mini-geysers of conflict which keep the plot bubbling. Dicker employs an array of mythological and literary allusions such as references to Icarus, fallen angels, ‘glory being a Gorgon that could turn you into stone’ and man’s Original Sin. Even Quebert’s celebrated book is called The Origin of Evil. Paradise Lost, anyone? The plot of The Truth about the Harry Quebert Affair illustrates the ripples of wrongdoing in the individual lives of characters flowing into and merging with each other. It also shows how the past informs the present. Other literary touches include motifs like Harry’s residence (which comes to signify different things over the course of the story), symbolism, social commentary and satire that doesn’t shy away from looking inward at the narrator, the world of writers and the books they write. While reading this novel, I was struck by the pride of place given to seagulls in it. I have a hunch that Joel Dicker was inspired by the characters and themes in Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull. The play explores the ills of fame and how the pursuit of celebrity usually has disastrous effects. Chekhov’s characters view obscurity as an unbearable fate and grapple with the gulf between their dreams of success and the reality of their mediocrity. Harry, Marcus and a few other characters contend with the same issues. Imposter syndrome and the threat of being exposed as a pretender looms large in both the play and the novel. Art being a replacement for love is another recurring idea in the story. At least three characters in the book are artists and all of them fill a void in their lives with writing or painting. To know out how it works out for them, you’d have to read the book. There’s a piece of advice Quebert gives Marcus – "Never write a book without knowing its ending.” That’s excellent advice for writers, I’m sure. Readers of this page-turner, however, are not likely to drop this book without knowing its ending.

This morning I read an article on a website called The Marginalian about the difference between fixed and growth mindsets which I would recommend to all of you. It makes the point that believing intelligence, character and personality to be static and unchangeable as opposed to attributes that can be developed through effort and learning is an attitudinal difference that colours our lives to an extent beyond what we commonly believe. Naturally, I applied these ideas to myself. I believe I have a growth mindset in terms of intelligence now but less so in terms of character and personality. That wasn’t always the case. Earlier when it came to decisions of education and career, I often took the easier path where I could just coast along. For instance, my idea was to saunter my way to the top five in my class rather than putting in an extra effort to make it to the top. “Can do better” was a staple remark in my report cards. At the time, my fixed mindset felt like a good gig because it made me feel intelligent without swotting for exams. Over the years, my outlook in this regard has changed. I now actively pursue learning about things I don’t know or understand. The process of learning gives me satisfaction whether it is reading a short post about the Bootstrap Paradox (check it out if you find time travel intriguing), the art of Hygge, a video about spacetime or an article about extended metaphors in literature. Don’t get me wrong, I don't understand most of what spacetime means. Very few do. But that’s okay, I tell myself, because today I comprehend more than I did yesterday. That ability to be okay with failure or not understanding is, to me, the crux of the Growth Mindset. As Winston Churchill said famously, "Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.” He may as well have been talking about the growth mindset. No matter how gradual the incline, I’m happy to be climbing. Not because it proves how smart I am though I must say, when the opportunity presents itself, I do flex a wee bit! However, the fixed mindset that I inhabited in other spheres of my life made me risk-averse to a degree that I stayed in a job that I stopped enjoying about six years ago. While the independence afforded by a monthly pay cheque cannot be discounted, it would be dishonest to pretend that it was a matter of urgent concern for me, given my savings over the years. It was more the trepidation of whether or not I could do something else well enough to get paid for it, that gave me pause. That doubt was enough to stop me in my tracks every time I thought I’d had enough of working for a media house where the only real challenge was to stomach the depths to which we were sinking, in terms of both content and standard operating practices. The fixed mindset made me settle for the dregs of what was instead of daring to leap for what may be. This, when I had no debt, no major expenses and enough savings to see me through at least a few years, if not more. Basically, I have no excuses to offer for my lack of courage. Serendipitously, near the end of 2020, a friend of mine, Smriti sent me a PDF version of a book on agriculture. It's a subject that doesn't interest me. However, she urged me to read this 146-page book. I tried to avoid it because reading on my laptop felt too annoying. But she persisted. Eventually, to indulge her and with the gentle support of the growth-oriented side of myself, I decided to read One Straw Revolution by Masanobu Fukuoka. For those who have read it, everything I say about One Straw Revolution will pale in comparison to the praise this book deserves and also, fail to encompass the entirety of what it is about. I submit to their criticism in advance, mostly because I agree with them. To those who have not yet read One Straw Revolution and hence, may be more forgiving, let me just say that it is a book about how farming can yield the greatest rewards if we would just yield to Nature and her ways – those of no tilling, no weeding, no insecticides amongst others. Needless to say, this kind of farming requires less effort even as it carries the risk of a few years of blighted crops and the scorn of naysayers. Fukuoka is something of a legend of the field (no pun intended) and his many years of learning are distilled into his philosophy of ‘do-nothing’ farming. As you can imagine, the ‘do-nothing’ bit appealed to my fixed mindset and lazy self! How did this book affect me? Well, I haven’t turned to farming and nor do I intend to. However, Fukuoka’s book is one of great subtlety or at least that is how I perceived it. To quote Edmund Wilson, “No two persons ever read the same book.” I believe that to be true even for people who read the same book twice. And the person I was when I read One Straw Revolution saw it as a spur to release control over my instinct to break away from what no longer satisfied me. To stop subjugating myself to an artificial idea of security which sheaths a fear of losing relevance and identity. And so, I resigned from a job I had held for more than fifteen years in the hope that I would be brave enough to try something new, fail, learn and slowly and eventually, succeed. Here’s hoping…