Reading in 2020 : The year-end 'best of' list

2020 was/is a year unlike any year we have lived so far for the most of us. In terms of reading,  it was just another year for me though. The only thing I tried to do differently this year was to stay clear of any books or movies related to pandemics or epidemics. As if we don't have enough already.

Since I am not a fan of movies in the pandemic category it was easy not to break down and watch World War Z or Contagion. These would have helped me get an idea about how the U.S. government and CDC mutants in space suits will tackle a global pandemic. Hint:  It is nothing like in the movies. The U.S. government does not watch Hollywood movies as Hollywood is infested by you-know-who, so they had absolutely zero clue as to how to deal with a planet-wide pandemic.

I also gave up on a book half-way through, Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic and How it Changed Science, Cities and the Modern World by Steven Johnson. It was not solely because of the subject - the cholera epidemic of 1854. While it was interesting to read how this epidemic changed the urban geography of the city of London to what it is today, the narrative became repetitive and started straying in different directions. My attention, as usual, was faltering. I will attempt it again next year, once I get vaccinated for my ADHD.

Here are the books-worth-my-time I read in 2020 in no particular order. Only 3 out of the 8 listed below were published this year.

1. Paying tribute for keeping the U.S.A number one in 2020, I will start off with Mary L. Trump's portrait of her uncle, Donald Trump - Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man (2020.) While the book feels rushed and could have been put together better, it is an intelligent insider's personal view of her family and her uncle - the man / the President who instigated/is instigating many (failed) soft coups at the American democracy. Read it, if you want to smell out the next Donald Trump in the making before it happens.

2. Of the Civil Rights Movement leaders, I empathize more with Malcolm X than with Martin Luther King. MLK, I have always felt, was promoted because he was a 'cleaner' African-American leader more acceptable to the white majority of the country. This year started with Netflix's documentary series, Who Killed Malcom X where historian Abdur Rahman Muhammad traces and condenses his thirty year of investigation about Malcolm X's assassination into a six part series.  This was followed by Autobiography of Malcolm X:  As Told to Alex Haley (1965), which focuses on Malcolm X's evolution as a street hustler to the charismatic speaker and leader of the Civil Rights era. 

3. I am closing out the year with Pulitzer prize winning author Les Payne's 25+ year labor love exploring and researching the life of Malcolm X, the biography The Dead are Arising : The Life of Malcolm X (2020.) The work was completed by the author's daughter and fellow researcher, Tamara Payne, although the final manuscript was ready before Les Payne's passing. I may attempt a separate review sometime later combining all the Malcolm X books, as they and their eminent and intriguing subject rightfully deserve.

4. Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at Time (2012) by Jeff Speck is far removed from the current mental state of the world. It was written at a time when when American downtowns were a bustle of activity, restaurants had not shuttered due to Covid-19 and some people did walk on the streets. But if we were to learn from history and the book that I gave up half-way, Ghost Map, pandemics have the power to upset the status quo which includes the urban way of life among many other things. The effects of it will percolate down to urban planning and how people use spaces. At that time it will be good to have a primer of things we did right and the things we had designed wrong in the past. Speck's works will be worth referring to improve on things when we rebuild our cities and economies after this year's setback.

5. I choose "Asian" when I have to choose my race while filling out forms and applications. Yet I do not identify myself as Asian. Like the rest of the United States, when I think Asian it is the people of east-Asian descent who are Asian. But like Cathy Park Hong points out in her book of essays - Minor Feelings (2020), United States immigration has for centuries barred entry of Asians from the entire continent of Asia, starting from the Naturalization Act of 1790 which made sure that only 'free white persons of good character' where allowed to immigrate to the U.S. While not all of Park Hong's essays from the collection resonated with me, it helped me understand another PoV from a representative of the same racial minority that I am also part of.

6. The Giver (1993) was one of my kids' middle school reading projects that was recommended to me by my kid. YA fiction is not usually my cup of tea, but for sharing the experience of a book with someone I love, I gave it a try. For young readers 10-13 who are the book's primary audience, Lois Lowry's The Giver is thought-provoking, intense, disturbing and engaging at the same time. I am glad I read it, it is a perfect book to discuss with your tween or teen. I appreciate Lowry writing such a powerful book for young audience. It is an oft-banned book, so I am glad for our schools choosing it as reading material for kids at that right age when they need to understand the importance of compassion and altruism, to understand there are many shades and colors between black and white.

7. Voices from Chernobyl : The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster by Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich (2006) - I read this in Jan '20 while watching HBO's Chernobyl as a companion piece. The HBO show was 'inspired' by the book and had some excellent performances. The book is composed of verbatim interview material, the voices of common people who were at Chernobyl or thereabouts when the disaster struck. Chernobyl did make a big impression on my mind as a kid, when it had happened in 1986. Then it faded out till the aughts when I chanced upon a website by a girl who documented Chernobyl on a motor bike - Elena Filatova - an Ukranian photographer and biker. Then it went dormant again till HBO came out with the TV show in 2019. Like the title says, the book is an oral history, a much-needed documentation of one of the most suppressed disasters in human history. Don't go looking for a complex literary masterpiece. What it is a simple and stark portrait of a section of humanity, during a dark and senseless hour, in their own words. Kudos to Svetlana Alexievich!

8. How do kids living in affluent western societies get taken by radical Islamic ideologies? Asne Seierstad's documentation of two Somali-American teenage girls from Norway who go to wage jihad in the Middle East is one window to the mysterious realm of teenage and what goes on there, making the kids act like they do. While Two Sisters : A Father, His Daughter and Their Journey into the Syrian Jihad (2018) offers no easy answers, it is a book just like the Trump one, that can be used to pick up the warning signals.

My Best Books Lists from the past

• 2019 Best Books List
• 2018 Best Books
• 2010 Best
• 2009

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Nine Hours To Rama : Movie Review

Nine Hours to Rama (1963) was the first foreign film banned in India. It was based on historian and Indophile Stanley Wolpert's novel of the same name and is a fictionalized account about the life of Nathuram Godse - the assassin of Mahatma Gandhi. It features a narrative capturing the final hours in the run-up to Gandhi's assassination on Jan 30, 1948, with a few biographical notes about Godse thrown in. This Anglo-American film was directed by Mark Robson who also directed films like Van Ryan's Express and Valley of the Dolls.

The book was banned by the Nehru administration upon its release in 1962 and subsequently the film was banned when it was released an year later. The reason for banning cited by the first Prime Minister of independent India - the liberal socialist Jawaharlal Nehru, was it supposedly portrayed Nathuram Godse in the wrong (better than he deserved) light and that it would have hurt the sentiments of certain sections of the population. That is a credible argument, although banning both the book, which clearly belonged to the fiction category and the movie based on it, was an overkill, especially for a progressive like Nehru. 

The real reason could have been that throughout the 2+ hours the camera was focused intensely on Godse and the Father of India, M.K.Gandhi was just a side character. Adding insult to the injury, for a movie based on an event that was a turning point in India's history, almost every consequential Indian character other than Gandhi was played by white actors.

Valerie Gearon and Horst Buchholz

Godse was played by German actor Horst Buchholz. Buccholz looks very Caucasian with his chiseled face, but can't say he didn't try his best to act his part. The women characters in the movie were also essayed by British/American actors. I appreciate the effort they had put into make them look Indian. The make-up (brown-face?) is excellent, the only thing that gives them away other than the language they speak - English, is their bone structure. The way these ladies carry off their acts in well draped saris and kurtas are some of the best sari-draping I have ever seen on western women. 

The character of Godse is shown as a beer-chugging, hot headed romantic chasing after women, which might have been the farthest from the real life Godse. So it is understandable the conservative Hindu RSS faction, to which Godse belonged, would definitely be incensed by this fictional Godse. Nathuram Godse, the real assassin, was a celibate, religious right wing activist and teetotaler. Here's Godse's letter on - "Why I Killed Gandhi"

J.S. Casshyap as Gandhi, with Robert Morley in white cap

Gandhi in this movie is the best Gandhi I have ever seen on silver screen. The most famous Gandhi on screen, Ben Kingsley's Oscar winning portrayal of the man in 1982 Attenborough film - Gandhi , looked a little too able-bodied, younger and muscular compared to how the real sixty, seventy year old person would have looked. Jamuna Swaroop Kashyap who portrayed Gandhi in Nine Hours To Rama, credited as J. S. Casshyap in the movie, was an excellent choice. He looked and delivered like the real life Mahatma Gandhi. Although one of the reasons Indian PM Jawaharlal Nehru cited on banning the film was that the person who played Mahatma in the film lacked dignity. For about 5 minutes of screen time in the entire movie and a handful of dialogues, I would say,  J.S.Casshyap did an amazing job, delivering the first believable Gandhi I have ever come across on screen. His claim to fame in Bollywood though was as a lyricist, from mid 1930s to 1950s. An English professor turned Hindi lyricist, he wrote the songs for Achhut Kanya (1936), one of the early super hit movies of Bollywood that had established the career of actor Ashok Kumar.

This is the first movie I have ever watched, based in India, much of it shot in location in India but the entire main cast of Indians were played by westerners. Delhi police chief Gopal Das was brought to life by an amazing Jose Ferrer (Cyrano de Bergerac, The Caine Mutiny, Moulin Rouge) Other actors like Valerie Gearon, Robert Morley, Harry Andrews (the Sikh general in the pic, alongside Jose Ferrer) and Diane Baker essayed other Indian characters. It was fascinating to see 50s-early 60s towns and villages of India in color, as there were a lot of outdoor locations in the movie. The only other non-Indian movie which I have watched that showed India of that time period in color is Jean Renoir's The River. A juicy bit of trivia about this movie is among all the inconsequential characters played by Indians or people of Indian descent there was a man named Basdeo Pandey who played a bit part of a laundry man, he went on to become the Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago (1995-2001.)

Nine Hours to Rama intriguing movie for a student of history or someone interested in India, Gandhi or Indian independence. The movie opens with the disclaimer that it is historical fiction, but its fidelity in the depiction of India (despite non-Indian actors in all major roles) and the socio-political climate of the times is remarkable.

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Cathy Park Hong's Minor Feelings : A book review

I picked up poet Cathy Park Hong's collection of essays, Minor Feelings to see if I can find any overlap between her life and experience as an Asian American immigrant and mine. We did have the same hyphenated American racial identity, although I personally had never considered myself Asian. Asian for me means the people from East Asia - China, Koreas, Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand and the like. But however I see it, I also understand the common the thread that binds us all - we all have roots in the continent of Asia, whether East Asia or West Asia and we are all outsiders, immigrants hot off the U.S immigration grill in most cases.

Park Hong, a Korean American born and brought up in California, touches this aspect of immigration history in one of her first essays. She reminds us that the immigration policies of the U.S government ever since the first immigration law was enacted in 1790 - The Naturalization Act, was intent on preventing non-white immigration. The 1790 law allows any free white person of “good character,” who has been living in the United States for two years or longer to apply for citizenship. Without citizenship, nonwhite residents are denied basic constitutional protections, including the right to vote, own property, or testify in court. This exclusion is especially concerning because 1 in 5 persons counted by the 1790 census was of African descent.

In 1882 the Chinese Exclusion Act passes, which bars Chinese immigrants from entering the U.S. This is the first time a specific group of immigrants are targeted by a U.S immigration law. In 1917 U.S. government decides to be impartial and expands the ban to all of Asia - restricting the entry of Filipinos even, a former colony. Then there is the much-maligned and rightly so, Japanese Americans internment camps during the Second World War. In 1965 under the threat of heightening Cold War, as a part of the PR exercise to revamp its image US opens doors to the degraded Asian people - but only the best and select professionals who already have advanced degrees and were highly trained- engineers and doctors were admitted in. Hong's book made me look this all up as her essays filled the gaps.

She also reflects on the sorry space taken up Asians in daily life. She ruminates thus about her own poetry reading, " I confront the infinite chasm between audience conception of the Poet and the underwhelming evidence of me as that poet. I just don't look that part. Asians lack presence. Asians take up apologetic space. We don't even have enough presence to be considered real minorities."

She says when she hears the phrase, 'Asians are next in line to be white', she replaces 'be white' with 'disappear', and that Asians reputed to be accomplished and law-abiding will disappear into this country's amnesiac fog.

While most of her essays resonated with me there were a couple that flew over my head. There was one where she expounds on the merits of Richard Pryor's standup and her appreciation of it. I never really understood Richard Pryor, even with closed captions on. Appreciating Pryor, might be like learning to appreciate dark beer. I need to drink a lot of light, craft and fruity beers to get there. Although many African American comedians I like, like Dave Chappelle, Chris Rock and Wayans Brothers consider Pryor the father of African American comedy. Maybe it was because Pryor created that niche for African Americans in the standup scene, where none had existed before. He was the pioneer, the reason why others could walk the trail he cleared. While Richard Pryor made Cathy Park Hong question the kind of audience she should be/is writing for, no stand-up comedian (except perhaps George Carlin) has ever led me down the tunnels of retrospection or life-reviews.

The other essay I breezed and skipped through was the one about her college days, female friendship and art. There was nothing wrong with the essay, it was just not a subject I cared much about. It delved too much on relationships, emotions and people and too less on hard cold facts, logic and info snippets that I tend to enjoy. My bad.

Minor Feelings is a hybrid of memoir and criticism. There were places where I could appreciate the poet in her, writing the essay, but there were also places where her prose dangerously veered into the stiff, incomprehensible parlance favored by academia. I could find similarities in her experiences and her diagnosis of situations that you are exposed solely by the merit of belonging to a racial minority.

In one of her essays, Park Hong mentions an anecdote about an award-winning poet of color say during a Q&A, "If you want to write about race, you have to do it politely, because then, people will listen." Minor Feelings is Cathy Park Hong trying to come clean of her politeness cover, talking about race in prose, it was good to hear an Asian voice on the subject - loud and clear.

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Notes on Jeff Speck's - Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time

Jeff Speck's paean to walkable, bike-able cities makes me want to plan a city. The only place they allow someone like me to plan cities is Minecraft and I don't even have the patience of my tween who is the resident Minecraft architect-planner. Therefore the easiest way to pay respect to the author and try out his ideas is to walk downtown, which I try to do a few times a week. 

Walkable City is full of interesting facts and statistics. Did you know that car crashes have killed 327 million Americans (up to this point in time), that is more than all our wars combined and is the leading cause of death for Americans between the ages of 1 and 34? 

Speck also says pollution is not what it used to be, American smog now comes principally from tailpipes not factories. Asthma related hospitalization reduced by a full 30% during the '96 Olympic games in Atlanta as more residents started walking and took public transit to downtown because of the impossibility of motoring around downtown during the Games.

As any walking enthusiast would have found out from his/her first few walking outing in American downtowns, block sizes affect walkability. Quoting verbatim from the book, "generally speaking the cities with the smallest blocks are the ones best known for walkability, ones with the largest blocks are places without street life. The pre-industrial neighborhoods of downtown Boston and Lower Manhattan like their European counterparts have blocks that averaged less than 200 feet long. Philadelphia's and San Francisco's blocks averaged less than 400 feet in length. And then there a pedestrian free cities like Irvine, California where many blocks are 1000 feet long."

I remember walking infinite blocks that seemed to extend forever flanking wide 3-4 lane roads in Anaheim, California with four kids in tow because I had a booked a hotel a "couple of blocks" away from the Disneyland entrance. Since it was only 2-3 blocks I was also trying to save money by not renting a car or using a rideshare app. Before this I had only driven in southern California, had never walked. That trip made me realize that southern California's cities and suburbs are one of the unfriendliest urban areas for walking.

The book provides an insight to how the human form and our physical limits affects urban planning, if urban planners would take heed. For example, we walk just under 3 mph hour in warm weather and around 2 mph in cold weather. We bow our heads 10 degrees while walking and we can see a person's movement at 100 yards and recognized and hear them at about 50. If we want to make our cities walkable, they should reflect our physical capabilities and limitations. We should design our public streets and squares smaller. Some of America's most famous public  squares like New York's Rockefeller Center, San Francisco's Ghirardelli Square and  San Antonio's Riverwalk are small - only very few are much broader than  60 yards across.

Instead what many of the 'unwalkable' US downtowns have is what is called the missing teeth phenomenon  - where every block of construction is surrounded by three blocks of empty lots or parking  thus rendering otherwise promising pedestrian environments uninviting. 

Speck also warns that smaller cities need to be aware that some big city practices are not made for them,  like the Barnes Dance intersection in big cities where all the pedestrians wait for a full cycle for all  the cars to stop and then are briefly given free reign over the entire intersection including diagonally. In smaller cities this would mean that the pedestrians will have to wait an inordinate amount of time before they get a chance to cross or there are no pedestrians to cross and traffic just idles unnecessarily, during hours of low volume foot traffic.

Speck points out that the planning of streets is as important block-sizes when it comes to walkability. No one prefers walking on the side of 4 lane road where vehicles are hurtling past at 60 mph. Increase in lane sizes result in approximately nine hundred additional traffic fatalities yearly (I forgot the get the reference for this from the book.) He says that increasing lane sizes in the name of safety (for motorists) is like distributing handguns to deter crime.

This is because humans always adjust their behavior to accommodate changes in risk patterns. The behavior is called risk homeostasis or risk compensation - becoming more careful where we sense greater risk and less careful if we feel more protected (wikipedia) It explains why poisoning deaths went up after child proof caps were introduced and people stopped hiding their medicines.

The best risk homeostasis report comes from Sweden a nation obsessed with traffic safety. In a single year in 1967 traffic fatalities dropped 17%. It turns out that March 9th 1967 Sweden switch driving on the left hand side of the road to drive right hand side of the road. Therefore Speck argues that the safest roads for both pedestrian and the motorists are those that feel the least safe demanding more attention from their drivers.

I was reading that while Walkable City pointed out the problems in U.S downtowns it didn't offer any real world solutions. So Jeff Speck came out with a follow up - a resource book of steps or rules to follow to make better urban places for people called Walkable City Rules : 101 Steps to Making Better Places. Maybe I will check that out next.

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Bron | Broen Review

Almost a decade after Scandi noir or Nordic noir  had migrated from books to TV screen, I happened to watch of one the flagship TV shows of the genre - Bron | Broen or The Bridge.  The bridge stands for the Øresund Bridge across Øresund strait that connects the southern Swedish town of Malmo to the Danish capital - Copenhagen. The crime that starts off season 1 of Bron | Broen leaves it dead body straddling the Swedish-Danish border passing through middle of Øresund bridge.

The long and looming, sometimes foreboding Bridge is an omnipresent character in the series. It is a team of two detectives, a Swedish and a Danish one who are given the responsibility to investigate this cross-border dead body / crime. Sofia Helin headlines as the Asperger-y Swedish cop - Saga Noren and the Danish side is represented by the warm and affable, Martin Rohde played by Kim Bodnia. They make an unlikely pair who hit off despite the odds.

Considering the geographical proximity and the cultural overlap of Sweden and Denmark across the strait, the series must have surely explored and presented nuances and references pertaining to the people of the region. Not being very much familiar to the place or the culture except the civil engineering marvel of Øresund bridge, all that was lost on me.

But the one thing that was not unfathomable is the brooding overcast geography and how it influences the people and their behavior in nordic climate. A third of my life was spent north of the 45th parallel in the snowy gray northern lands. My affinity towards Nordic crime dramas is natural. The landscape and the weather are familiar, the IKEA-ish interiors not so much - but that's okay, mega IKEA box stores are working hard at converting the interior-scape on this side of the Atlantic too. As soon as IKEA introduces two-day shipping to Alaska we will be brewing our own home-grown noir in our northern country.

The other attraction for me is the prominent presence of strong, unconventional women protagonists in Nordic noir, starting with Stieg Larsen's Lisbeth Salander aka The Girl with Dragon Tattoo in the 2000s to Bron | Broen's Saga Noren. While Bron | Boren is an engaging crime drama, that evolves into a better version of itself each passing season, I am not really convinced about the way the creators have coached Sofia Helin to play a detective on the spectrum. Then again most characters on the autistic spectrum on TV are stereo-typical, with certain traits exaggerated - the way the majority neurotypical society perceives how a person with Asperger's syndrome should be. As they say once you meet an autistic person, you know one autistic person. Helin's Saga Noren is probably one of the better depictions out there, because I know, I tried watching the U.S version of Bron | Broen.

Bron | Broen inspired a series of remakes the world over in various languages including a U.S one on FX called The Bridge and a French version called The Tunnel. There are also three other remakes take place at the borders of Estonia / Russia, Malaysia / Singapore and Germany / Austria. I almost started watching the U.S one by accident, then I was warned by a concerned loved one to stay clear of it. I am glad such people exist in my life.

But after finishing Season 1 of Bron | Broen, my curiosity got better of me and I sneaked in a fast forwarded S1E1 of the US series. OMG - it was like I had averted a major catastrophe. It was a let down on all fronts. The Hollywoodization of the show made sure that the direction, screenplay, casting and acting went out of the window. 120 lb, 5' 7" waif like Diane Kruger guarding the El Paso-Jaurez Bridge of the Americas against drug lords, coyotes and ICE, sauntering into mob bosses' dens in the middle of the night without backup? Gimme a break. On top of it - a police officer with Asperger's syndrome wearing make-up? I am so done. I like Damian Bichir, but the dialogs and the hamming of other actors were so over the top that Bichir's natural style looked out of place.

I am half way past Season 3. Kim Bodnia said goodbye to the series after season 2 (the rumor was the presence of anti-Semitic elements at the main shooting location of Malmo) and in comes as Saga Noren's Danish counterpart a much younger Thure Lindhart playing detective Henrik Sabroe. He is another broken character like Saga Noren. I have one more season to go after this, we will see how that goes.

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