Two Mothers

Two Mothers and other stories by Khalid Mohamed

Publisher: Om Books International

I have just started reading this book. The book dedication reads thus,

Fayazi ma for telling me stories without an end...

Stories without a beginning and an end are quite sweet and self-cleansing. Just like how you feel when you wake up from sleep while travelling by train in the middle of a hot afternoon. No idea of what went past and what is coming. You see only a distant mountain and near-by fields but everything is passing out of the window. You keep watching from your little window.

Sufi comics

Muhammed Ali Vakil's book on Sufi comics:

http://www.hindustantimes.com/Sufi-stories-in-comic-format/Article1-691927.aspx

http://www.flipkart.com/b/books/40-sufi-comics-mohammed-ali-book-1456461273

His website: http://www.vakil.org/

You can read online here: http://issuu.com/mohammedalivakil/docs/40_sufi_comics

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Modern Science Writings

In the book "The Oxford book of modern science writing", edited by Richard Dawkins, the selections are from the following books (some are articles or just poems). You may want to see how many of them you can finish in 2011 in its original glory. Please comment if there are any typos and errors in the compilation.

 

Alan Turing:::::Computing machinery and intelligence

Albert Einstein:::::Ideas and opinions

Alister Hardy:::::The open sea

Arthur Eddington:::::The expanding universe

Barbara & George Gamow:::::Said Ryle to Hoyle

Brian Greene:::::The elegant universe

C P Snow:::::Foreword to Hardy's Apology

Carl Sagan:::::The demon-haunted world

Carl Sagan:::::Pale blue dot

Claude E Shannon & Warren Weaver:::::The mathematical theory of communication

Colin Blakemore:::::The mind machine

D'Arcy Thompson:::::On growth and form

Daniel Dennett:::::Darwin's dangerous idea

Daniel Dennett:::::Consciousness explained

David Deutsch:::::The fabric of reality

David Lack:::::The life of the robin

Donald C Johanson & Maitland A Edey:::::Lucy-Beginnings of humankind

Douglas Hofstadter:::::Godel, Escher, Bach-The eternal golden braid

Edward O. Wilson:::::The diversity of life

Ernst Mayr:::::The growth of biological thought

Erwin Schrodinger:::::What is life?

Francis Crick:::::Life itself

Francis Crick:::::What mad pursuit

Fred Hoyle:::::Man in the universe

Freeman Dyson:::::Disturbing the universe

G C Williams:::::Adaptation and natural selection

G G Simpson:::::The meaning of evolution

G H Hardy:::::A mathematician's apology

Garrett Hardin:::::The tragedy of the commons

George Gamow:::::Mr. Tompkins

George Gaylord Simpson:::::The meaning of evolution

Helena Cronin:::::The ant and the peacock

Ian Stewart:::::The miraculous jar

J A Wheeler & Kenneth Ford:::::Geons, black holes and quantum foam

J B S Haldane:::::On being the right size

J B S Haldane:::::Cancer's a funny thing

J Robert Oppenheimer:::::War and the nations

Jacob Bronowski:::::The identity of man

James Jeans:::::The mysterious universe

James Watson:::::Avoid boring people

Jared Diamond:::::The rise and fall of the third chimpanzee

John Maynard Smith:::::The importance of the nervous system in the evolution of animal flight

John Tyleer Bonner:::::Life cycles

Jonathan Kingdon:::::Self-made man

Julian Huxley:::::Essays of a biologist

Lancelot Hogden:::::Mathematics for the million

Lee Smolin:::::The life of the cosmos

Lewis Thomas:::::Seven wonders

Lewis Wolpert:::::The unnatural nature of science

Loren Eiseley:::::The immense journey

Mark Ridley:::::The explanation of organic diversity

Martin Gardner:::::The fantastic combinations of John Conway's new solitaire game 'Life'

Martin Rees:::::Just six numbers

Matt Ridley:::::Genome

Max F Perutz:::::A passion for crystals

Nicholas Humphrey:::::One self - a meditation on the unity of consciousness

Niko Tinbergen:::::Curious Naturalists

Oliver Sacks:::::Uncle Tungsten

Paul Davies:::::The goldilocks enigma

Per Bak:::::How nature works

Peter Atkins:::::Creation revisited

Peter Medawar:::::Science and literature

Peter Medawar:::::Darwin's illness

Peter Medawar:::::The phenomenon of mind

Primo Levi:::::The periodic table

R A Fisher:::::The genetical theory of natural selection

Rachel Carson:::::The sea around us

Richard Feynman:::::The character of physical law

Richard Fortey:::::Trilobite!

Richard Fortey:::::Life - an unauthorized biography

Richard Gregory:::::Mirrors in mind

Richard Leakey & Roger Lewin:::::Origins reconsidered

Robert Trivers:::::Social Evolution

Roger Penrose:::::The emperor's new mind

Russell Stannard:::::The time and space of uncle Albert

S Chandrasekhar:::::Truth and beauty

Stephan Hawking:::::A brief history of time

Stephan Jay Gould:::::Hen's teeth and horse's toes

Steve Jones:::::The language of the genes

Steven Pinker:::::The language instinct

Steven Pinker:::::How the mind works

Steven Weinberg:::::Dreams of a final theory

Sydney Brenner:::::Theortical biology in the third millennium

Theodosius Dobzhansky:::::Mankind evolving

W D Hamilton:::::Geometry for the selfish herd

W D Hamilton:::::Narrow roads of geneland

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Create E-books from Wikipedia

You can create e-books from Wikipedia pages. This article in Business Line talks about it. These are help pages from Wikipedia:
1. For beginners
2. For experts
3. FAQ
The tool is "Book Creator".

A Habit of Lies

John A Hewitt writes on his website,

This site is about the way scientists cheat, by falsifying the scientific literature and rigging debate to include and acknowledge only "acceptable" opinion. It is derived from my as yet unpublished book "A Habit of Lies." The particular topic is taken from my own experiences in the field of cell biology but I think the practices described are widespread.

You can read A Habit of Lies here.

Strand Book Festival

The Strand Book Festival is back.

Venue: Basava Bhavan (Opposite Hotel Chalukya & Sophia School), Bangalore
Period: From 26th November (Thursday) To 13th December (Sunday)
(Incl. 3 Sundays)
Time: 10am - 8.30pm

Address of the book shop:

Strand Book Stall,
Manipal Centre, Dickenson Road, Bangalore-42
Phone: 25580000/2222, 30577661-3

They have a website too: www.strandbookstall.com. But when I had visited it Google flashed me the following message:

What is the current listing status for strandbookstall.com?
Site is listed as suspicious - visiting this web site may harm your computer.
Part of this site was listed for suspicious activity 3 time(s) over the past 90 days.

I have written to Strand Book Stall about this.

To this blog's friends: I am back with my post after a long time. You will, hopefully, now see posts regularly :-)

Man Booker Prize 2007 - Announced

Anne Enright was named the winner of the £50,000 Man Booker Prize for Fiction for her novel The Gathering. For more details, read this page.
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Man Booker Prize 2007 - six novels shortlisted

The six novels shortlisted are:

• Darkmans by Nicola Barker
• The Gathering by Anne Enright
• The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid
• Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones
• On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan
• Animal’s People by Indra Sinha

The discussion forum at the official site is here.
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Book Search Engines

Pradeep Sebastian writes about buying books - used, out-of-print, rare, first editions, etc - on the internet. The following is the list of websites mentioned in the article.

1. Alibris
2. Biblio
3. Abebooks
4. Bibliopoly
5. Bibliophile
6. Biblion
7. TomFolio
8. BookFinder (for price comparison as well)
9. AddALL (for price comparison as well)

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Rejection?

Rejection is part of life.

Some of the famous rejection stories are (from here) :

1. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone – 14 rejections
2. Jonathan Livingston Seagull – 18 rejections
3. Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell – 38 rejections
4. From rejection slip for George Orwell's Animal Farm: “It is impossible to sell animal stories in the U.S.A.”
5. From rejection slip for article sent to the San Francisco Examiner to Rudyard Kipling: “I'm sorry, Mr. Kipling, but you just don't know how to use the English language."
6. From rejection slip for The Diary of Anne Frank: “The girl doesn't, it seems to me, have a special perception or feeling which would lift that book above the curiosity level.”

In Search of ... my bride

From Raja Rao’s (a sort of) introduction (this is reproduced in his The Meaning of India) to The Policeman and the Rose:

… These stories were written mainly in France, and at the time when Valéry and Gide dominated the literary universe. A south-Indian brahmin, nineteen, spoon-fed on English, with just enough Sanskrit to know I knew so little, with an indiscrete education in Kannada, my mother-tongue, the French literary scene overpowered me. If I wanted to write, the problem was, what should be the language of expression, an what my structural models – Sanskrit contained the vastest riches of any, both in terms of style and word-wealth, and the most natural to my needs, yet it was beyond my competence to use. To marry Sanskrit and Gide in Kannada, and go further, would have demanded an immense stretch of time, and I was despairingly impatient. French, only next to Sanskrit, seemed the language most befitting my demands, but then it’s like a harp (or vina); its delicacy needed an excellence of instinct and knowledge that seemed well-nigh terrifying. English remained the one language, with its great tradition (if only of Shakespeare) and its unexplored riches, capable of catalyzing my impulses, and giving them a near native sound and structure. “I will not write like the English,” I was to write in an introduction to Kanthapura, “I can only write as an Indian.” I will have to write my English, yet English after all – and how soon we forget this – is an Indo-Aryan tongue. Thus to stretch the English idiom to suit my needs seemed heroic enough for my urgentmost demands…. So why not Sanskritic (or if you will, Indian) English?

… Thus both in terms of language and of structure, I had to find my way, whatever the results. And I continued the adventure in lone desperation. I was now truly in search of – my bride…

-----------------------------------------------------

When I read the above, I wondered (and pondered) at his search of my bride. Raja Rao himself threw a light on it in one of his articles on – guess what - words.

The word is alive. It is alive in the sense in which a caterpillar, a starling,
a hippopotamus is, or like vriksha (tree), spanda (pulsation), ishvara (god)
are. The word has membranes. It is palpitant, breathful. The word has
self-existence. For each word has, first a noumenal, then a cosmological, and
finally, a phonemological reality.

Then he quotes a Sanskrit sloka:

Many a man who sees does not discover the word.

And many a man who hears does not hear it.

Yet for another it reveals itself like

A radiant bride to her husband.

An Experiment in Honesty

From Raja Rao's preface to The Great Indian Way:

... The writing of this book has been an experiment in honesty. Facts of course are there, but facts are shrill. They have a way of saying more than they mean, and disbelievingly so. The silences and the symbols are omitted, and meaning taken out of breath and performance. Facts have to flow into event - there has to be rasa, flavour, to make facts melt into life. And the Indian experience is such a palimpsest, layer behind layer of tradition and myth and custom go to make such an existence: gesture is ritual, and each act a statement in terms of philosophy, superstition, historical or linguistic provincialism, caste originality, or merely a personal one, and yet it's all a whole, it's India. Thus to face honesty against an Indian event, an Indian life, one's expression has to be epic in style or to lie ...

... The Pauranic style, therefore, is the only style an Indian can use - fact against custom, history against time, (and I was going to say) geography against space, and it is these coordinates that have to change and make the life larger than it seems, and its small impurities and accidents and parts, must perforce be transmuted into equations where the mighty becomes normal, and the normal in its turn becoming myth. Prose and poetry thus flow into one another, the personal and the impersonal, making the drama altogether noble and simple ...

... The Purana is never true except against the background of Truth - that is where the essence of fact shines ...

... If I have written thus another life of Gandhi, it's because most of the biographies (whether American or French, Greek or English) are true generally to facts but not so to meaning. There are, however, biographies by Indians - the official and monumental one is an extravagant dictionary of dates and facts, and the more able and personal ones exhausting demonstration of the amalgam of human existence ...

... A biography of Gandhi it seemed to me had to be written as it were from the inside, desperately, faithfully. It's an ambitious task. Should one dare it - I have ...

Let us play Raja Rao

Raja Rao's introductions to his books are as fascinating as books themselves.

From Raja Rao's introduction to The meaning of India:

... I AM NO SCHOLAR. I am a "creative" writer. I love to play with ideas. It is like a chessgame with horses, elephants, chamberlains, and the Kings which might fight with one another. The game is not winning. It is for rasa - delight...

... I enjoy the juxtapostion of ideas. I play. The end, I have been taught, is not a question of success or defeat, but the abolition of contradiction, of duality - and of the peace it should bring to one. I play the game knowing I am the game. That, is the meaning of India...

...When this battle is over, you go, step by step, up the Himalayas, to Manasarovar. You are alone there. The sun shines on the high snows. The waters sizzle, but you can see and hear silence. The wonder is there is no listener. No. None...

...These essays were written for different occasions mostly from the last thirty years. I must be forgiven for repetitions, sometimes, especially of the Purusha Suktha, and sometimes, even of my personal interpretations (in foolishness or ignorance) of texts. In one case, of Nala and Damayanti, there is such a mixup of myths, I must be forgiven for this misdemeanour...

...It is just the game. Come, let us play, you and I...

Raja Rao's Ganga Ghat

When Raja Rao writes, words show different dimensions accompanied by a shift in meaning that may possibly lead a reader to go beyond them.

He writes To The Reader in On the Ganga Ghat:

These stories are so structured that the whole book should be read as one single novel. All persons and places are not true - but real. There is a glossary at the end for those who need any particular name or word explained. Yet, it must be said, why not just flow with the Ganges.

He also quotes Sri Atmananda Guru before that To The Reader.

What is that?

"Water Does Not Flow"

---------------------------------------

Raja Rao has written the following on the editor's copy of On the Ganga Ghat:

Hoping this book when read would be like a dip in the waters of Benares.

The Writer and the Word

Excerpts from Raja Rao's talk, The writer and the word:

... Triple are the constituents of a book - the word, the author, the reader. The word which says what the author has to indicate, and the reader has to apprehend, seems to be the one element we seem to neglect, as if it were something we know so well that we may not investigate its nature, its function, its end. For the word, like every constituted thing, seems to have birth, a life-span, and a death ...

... It is just the same way that you feel you will live for ever, though your life span might be seventy or eighty years. The feel that you are everlasting demands that everything be everlasting. Hence the demand that the word be eternal. If man is eternal, so is the word ...

... he who says the word enunciates the word, and he who hears it has to have the eternal part awakened in him so that there could be right communication. If the transient speaks to the transient it becomes a cacophony. But if eternal, the unchanging, speaks to the unchanging, in me, in you, we have one language ...

... Therefore my argument is, unless you, the writer, could go back to the changeless in yourself, you could not truly communicate with the reader, if at that level the reader exists truly, then the question: who speaks to whom would not arise at all ...

... It is my conviction (basing myself on my Indian background) that you cannot really communicate unless you have no desire to really communicate ...

... Unless the author becomes an upasaka and enjoys himself in himself (which is Rasa) the eternality of the sound (Sabda) will not manifest itself, and so you cannot communicate either - so the word here becomes nothing but a cacophony ...

... The word indeed is eternal ...

... The word is but vibrant silence compounded into a momentary act. The act has to be like prayer if it should yield what you want it to yield. Even to say a flower, you must be able to say it in such a way that the force of the vocable, has the potency to create the flower. Unless the word becomes mantra no writer is a writer, and no reader a reader ...

... Thus we give sound back to silence and the seemingly divided remains undivided ...

Notes from Bangalore Book Festival 2006

There were heads, heads, and heads everywhere. I had to navigate my way slowly. No complaints for that. It was nice to see books, books, and books all around. In addition, if the book seller gives you many details with a smile you will know that two minds have reached each other - an invisible rope that finds two nubs on its ends.

Now for the notes -

When I entered the stall of Karnataka Sahitya Bandara I had only the name of a book in my mind. I did not know the author. Moreover, I wanted to buy the English translation of that book. I went to an old man sitting and asked,

"Sir, I am looking for a book named Shantala. I don't know either the author or the publisher."

"Shantala by K. V. Iyer? We have."

"Do you have the English version?"

"No, Sir. We have the original Kannada book. I think two versions of English translation are available. But I am not sure if they are unabridged. There is an abridged version published by Sahitya Academy."

He started telling me about G.V. Iyer's serial on Shantala with vividness that was matched only by his sharp eyes - an invisible rope was braided between two nubs.
_________________


Nadam Geetam is a book-seller from Chennai. They sell books of all major Tamil publishers. I could not enter their stall. The gap given was small. Excuse-me would lose its meaning in such places where you had entire queue moving at snail's pace. No one could have done better. They had to see books. They had to thump through it too. I moved myself close to a friendly-looking person and asked,

"Do you have Laa. Sa. Raa's ithazhkal?"

"Sir, We don't have Laa. Sa. Raa at all."

"But I remember seeing few books by him."

"No, Sir. We do not have stocks."

But I had seen Laa. Sa. Raa's paarkadal and janani few minutes back. I did not pay much attention to those books as I have them already.

Note: There is an article (in Tamil) written by my friend on Laa. Sa. Raa. It is available here.

Thanks Abi, for telling me how to incorporate this box in a post.

I was now hearing there were no books by Laa. Sa. Raa. I thought I would again stand in the queue and push myself near the place wherever I saw those two books. I saw three Laa. Sa. Raa books this time. The third book was Soundarya. I have that book too. I called the friendly-looking person and showed him those three books by Laa. Sa. Raa. He felt bad.

"What can I do, Sir? See the crowd around here. I keep forgetting. Sorry, Sir. You would like to have these?"

"No, Thanks. I have them all. I am looking for ithazhkal."

"Sorry Sir. We really do not have. Vanathi publishers have not printed that book for a long time."

"Oh, Okay. Thanks."

"Sir.."

Why his tone had become importunate? I looked at his face. His face seemed to have only request.

"Please do not tell this to the owner."

He pointed his hand towards a bald-headed man sitting at one end.

"I won't tell. I just thought I would show those books to you so that if someone else asks for Laa. Sa. Raa’s books you would not say no. That's all. I won't tell your owner about this."

His face had again become very friendly, and there was a smile. I too smiled. An invisible rope relaxed itself to release the strength from its plaits.

________________


There were two persons at Krishnamurti Foundation Books stall. One was a middle-aged man moving around the stall, and the other was a middle-aged lady sitting with Cash bill receipts. Both were amiable but the lady seemed to gauge everyone if they were potential buyers or not. If she had felt they were, she would then ask the man to show this-book, that-book, and the book-over-there. On the other hand, if she had felt they were here just to browse, she would become invisible. No magic here. What I meant is she would just become invisible. If you asked something you would get some answer after few hours. And I was just looking. My eyes went to a book that was covered by a transparent wrapper. Enough care was taken to wrap it so tightly that no one should see anything other than the front and back covers. You had to take it to see the back cover. I was just seeing the front cover by lifting my head as it was kept in the top of a rack. I was looking and looking. Only at the front cover. The front cover read One Thousand Moons: Krishnamurti at Eighty-Five. The man came closer to me and asked me if I wanted to see the book.

"I want to see the book but it is wrapped."

"I will show you the book. We have one book unwrapped."

He turned around to see the lady. The lady was busy writing the cash bill for a customer. Then he said,

"We can unwrap it and show. The book costs about Rs.800/- and you can buy the book if it interests you."

"Thanks."

He could not find the unwrapped book. He asked a boy to find out in a carton to see if it was there. The boy was searching for the book. The man lost hope of finding the unwrapped book, almost asked the boy to give him a wrapped book. By then, the lady had finished her billing and asked the man what it was. He explained. The lady looked at me. I could sense that a judging algorithm was initiated within her to see if I was a potential buyer. The algorithm said no. She said in a stronger tone that they did not have an unwrapped book. I told her,

"It's okay."

I saw the man. His countenance showed a sort of helplessness. I smiled at him, and told him, "It's okay." An invisible rope was vibrating; braiding and unbraiding. Then the lady threw a deal at me. The deal that made me laugh.

"If you buy the book, we can then show it here."

What a deal!

"If I buy that book, I would like to read it at home. Not here."

She did not say anything for few seconds, and then nodded her head in approval.

But did I see a smile in the man's face?
_______

Bangalore Book Festival 2006

Bangalore Book Festival opens on November 10, 2006. It will be held till 19th November.

Venue: Palace Grounds (Mekhri Circle entrance)

Time: 11 a.m. to 8 p.m.

Entry fee: Rs. 20/- (It was ten rupees last year!!)

The Hindu says that there will be a search engine manned by trained personnel to help you locate the book you want. But we often cherish serendipitous moments during such book festivals when we suddenly spot a book of our interest, or more accurately when a book finds a worthy reader in us.

Update

Time: 11 a.m. to 9 p.m.

Foreword by Raja Rao

Some books have wonderful forewords. Here is one of them.

Foreword to Raja Rao's Kanthapura by Raja Rao

My publishers have asked me to say a word of explanation.

There is no village in India, however mean, that has not a rich sthala-purana, or legendary history, of its own. Some god or godlike hero has passed by the village – Rama might have rested under this papal-tree, Sita might have dried her clothes, after her bath, on this yellow-stone, or the Mahatma himself, on one of his many pilgrimages through the country, might have slept in this hut, the low one, by the village gate. In this way the past mingles with the present, and the gods mingle with men to make the repertory of your grandmother always bright. One such story from the contemporary annals of my village I have tried to tell.

The telling has not been easy. One has to convey in a language that is not one’s own; the spirit that is one’s own. One has to convey the various shades and omissions of a certain thought-movement that looks maltreated in an alien language. I use the word ‘alien’, yet English is not really an alien language to us. It is the language of our intellectual make-up, like Sanskrit or Persian was before, but not of our emotional make-up. We are all instinctively bilingual, many of us writing in our own language and in English. We cannot write like the English. We should not. We cannot write only as Indians. We have grown to look at the large world as part of us. Our method of expression therefore has to be a dialect which will some day prove to be as distinctive and colorful as the Irish or the American. Time alone will justify it.

After language the next problem is that of style. The tempo of Indian life must be infused into our English expression, even as the tempo of American or Irish life has gone into the making of theirs. We, in India, think quickly, we talk quickly, and when we move we move quickly. There must be something in the sun of India that makes us rush and tumble and run on. And our paths are paths interminable. The Mahabharatha has 214778 verses and the Ramayana 48000. Puranas there are endless and innumerable. We have neither punctuation nor the treacherous ‘ats’ and ‘ons’ to bother us – we tell one interminable tale. Episode follows episode, and when our thoughts stop our breath stops, and we move on to another thought. This was and still is the ordinary style of our story-telling. I have tried to follow it myself in this story.

It may have been told of an evening, when as the dusk falls and through the sudden quiet, lights leap up in house after house, and stretching her bedding on the veranda, a grandmother might have told you, newcomer, the sad tale of her village.

N. Ram hammers Shashi Tharoor

N. Ram writes in his article on R. K. Narayan,

There is a tendency among some lesser writers of Indian origin, the likes of Shashi Tharoor, to denigrate the literary art and achievement of Narayan. Among other things, his vision is held to be "narrow"; his concerns "banal"; the pool of experience and vocabulary he drew from "shallow"; his style "pedestrian," "metronomic," "predictable," "limited and conventional," and "impoverished" (all these adjectives must be credited to a Tharoor column). The birth centenary is perhaps a good occasion to proclaim that there can be no serious question about where Narayan stands in the literary world, especially in relation to his detractors.

Will Shashi Tharoor write something about this in his next week The Hindu column?

Keep watching.

Update:

Shashi Tharoor's article referred above is available here.

So long as ....

The words written in the past often acquire a life of their own in the present. The shadow that befalls our understanding will linger long in our minds creating imageries of the past, unveiling the present, and constructing the hope for the future.

The following is the author's preface from Les Misérables by Victor Hugo, translated by Charles E. Wilbour:

So long as there shall exist, by reason of law and custom, a social condemnation, which, in the face of civilisation, artificially creates hells on earth, and complicates a destiny that is divine, with human fatality; so long as the three problems of the age- the degradation of man by poverty, the ruin of woman by starvation, and the dwarfing of childhood by physical and spiritual night- are not solved; so long as, in certain regions, social asphyxia shall be possible; in other words, and from a yet more extended point of view, so long as ignorance and misery remain on earth, books like this cannot be useless.

Hauteville House, 1862.