Of e-books and book racks

I once dreamed of having a library of my own; you know, the kind that Uncle Scrooge had; one with a ladder and huge racks lining an entire room, an easy chair and a small fireplace. Then I found e-books. Thousands upon thousands of them. And then there was talk of book readers which more and more closely mimick real books without taking up that space. So supposing they finally made one real-book look-alike capable of storing a million books, what would I decorate my study-room with? Much of the charm of real books is being able to put them up in a rack where visitors can come and stare at them with awe. The books you have in your book-racks convey, in some sense, the kind of person you are. With all the million books now hidden away in a tiny device lying around on a desk, who/what will tell visitors to my house what kind of person I am? I think I'll still keep real books around. After all, a library with so many books that you need a ladder is so cool!

Knowledge...

A creeping sense of despair and ignorance has taken me over. I've been reading Suketu Mehta's Maximum City. Here's a man who claims to have met Bal Thackery and asked him personal questions, has spoken to Chhota Shakeel, has spent several days with the top hit-men of D-Company. He has Vidhu Vinod Chopra as a personal friend and a dance-bar dancer as a friend. Here's a man who claims personal interaction with Gulshan Kumar's murderer. That is just two years after he has returned to the country. I spent the last 4 years here without a clue to what goes on in this city. I wander out, lost, onto my terrace. My head reeling with a new perspective of this hybrid city, New York and Los Angeles rolled into one. The wind is gusty and the rain gods have held their fury for a day giving us respite from the continuous downpour. I look across lake Powai, at a shimmering Hiranandani colony. I could be a writer I think. I should have been one. But then, how little I know and how much courage it would take to try and find out and more courage still to write it down. A friend complains about how he cannot understand what to do about the girl he loves. His helplessness is genuine, but it seems so trivial, so immaterial. How would it matter. The world seems so complex. Have spent the last few days trying to understand monetary theory, financial markets. There seems to be so much at work here. So much on the surface and perhaps so much more under the covers. And then suddenly the moon breaks out from the clouds. The city melts away and my attention is turned towards the heavens. Suddenly, even the gangsters, the financial markets and national politics seem trivial. There is the explanation of the universe which is still missing. There is the eternal question of who we are and why we are here. Somehow, suddenly, the quantum- and astro- physicists seem to be the most important people on earth. They are the ones trying to answer the hardest questions. Yet here I stand, knowing nothing, reaching out with open hands, grasping nothing. With what little more I learn, my appetite grows. More. More I scream. I wish to move out of my body and spend the rest of my life just watching the world; absorbing it, every detail, every nuance; learning the ways of the world without having to be part of it. Gathering every last bit of knowledge to be had yet without a desire to use it. A dangerous desire it is at this age and I cannot understand the source of this desire; but then knowledge of the self is perhaps the hardest to have, awarded only to the truly blessed....

Suketu Mehta speaks...

I have begun reading Maximum City by Suketu Mehta. So far it is strangely depressing. You almost feel like the city (Bombay) is engulfing you. With the rains not having ceased for the last several days and being stuck in my room, the feeling's much worse. However, there is something which is very cliche but which he says very well. I thought I'd put it down...


Long before the millennium, Indians such as the late prime minister Rajiv Gandhi were talking about taking the country into the twenty-first century, as if the twentieth century could just be leapfrogged. India desires modernity; it desires computers, information technology, neural networks, video on demand. But there is no guarantee of a constant supply of electricity in most places in the country. In this, as in every other area, the country is convinced it can pole-vault over the basics: develop world-class computer and management institutes without achieving basic literacy; provide advanced cardiac surgery and diagnostic imaging while the most easily avoidable childhood diseases run rampant; sell washing machines that depend on a non-existent water supply from shops that are dark most hours of the day because of power cuts; support a dozen private and public companies offering mobile phone services, while the basic land telephone network is in terrible shape; drive scores of new cars that go from 0 to 60 in ten seconds without any roads where they might do this without killing everything inside and out, man and beast.

It is an optimistic view of technological progress - that is you reach for the moon, you will somehow, automatically, span the inconvenient steps in between. Inda has the third-largest pool of technical labour in the world, but a third of its one billion people can't read or write. An Indian scientist can design a supercomputer, but it won't work because the junior technician cannot maintain it properly. The country produces some of the best technical brains in the world but neglects to teach my plumber how to fix a toilet so it stays fixed. It is still a Brahmin-oriented system of education; those who work with their hands have to learn for themselves. Education has to do with reading and writing, with abstractions, with higher thought."


Slightly exaggerated in my opinion, but on the dot. I hope its not all gloomy later in the book. I don't want to lose hope on India even before I try to do something myself.