Deborah Liu's Take Back Your Power or A Philosophy of Life for Women to Live with Less Editing

In the last year or so I have become a sort of an YouTube connoisseur, should be clearly evident from my posts here. This has led me to wonder whether I should keep my only streaming service subscription, Netflix as I rarely find time to indulge in its myriad shows anymore. My only current gripe about YouTube is there are no channels about women's life/philosophy from a personal angle or general woman-related career woes channels. 

I have not had success in finding some generic woman-hosted channel where a generic woman talks about anything and everything. I have found a few good ones by women navigating life solo or after-sixties-advise, but even those are about a specific topic like solo 60 year old leading an RV life – that is a very specific niche if you ask me. I want an everyday person talking deep thoughts, giving away random information no one is asking for. Maybe I should start one.

This also brings me to the book I want to talk about today - Deborah Liu’s Take Back Your Power. It is a kind of book I have not seen many women write. There is Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In and Brene Brown’s books, but they are experts in their areas, not regular Janes. I want to read ordinary women talking about their life, struggles and careers and their woman-on-the-wire acts. Deborah Liu is closer to the terrafirma most of us regular women inhabit than Ms. Brown or Ms. Sandberg. Although Liu was not that much of a normie either – her last job was as the CEO of Ancestry.com. So she has clearly played at a higher level than most of us.

The reason I connected with her book is that she writes about the awkward middle part and her entire career has been in tech, just like me. She felt like a woman like me dealing with the strange human politics that come with being a woman trying to operate in spaces that were not necessarily built with women in mind. And having spent most of my career in technology, this part landed harder than I expected.

I have lived some version of almost every story she tells. I have been the woman in the room who knows the answer, a titled leader of the team and still has to calculate whether saying it will create a problem. I have been talked over. I have watched someone repeat an idea I just said five minutes ago and suddenly everyone becomes fascinated because a man said it.

Liu talks about Hillary Clinton being criticized in law school because some people felt her presence was taking a place away from a man who could potentially avoid being drafted. What struck me was not just the unfairness of that situation, it was the psychological message underneath it: a woman's ambition is not neutral. Her success changes the equation. She is not just trying to win, she is making someone else uncomfortable by existing there. After enough exposure to that kind of message, you learn to manage yourself. You soften your words. You add disclaimers. You make yourself easier to digest. And then one day you realize you have become incredibly skilled at editing yourself!

This is where Liu’s discussion of women being caught in a double bind really resonated with me. I have personally experienced the strange contradiction of being told to be more confident while also being subtly punished when I am confident. I have also been told to be more vulnerable by male leaders, and I understand what they are trying to say. They want everyone to see my human side. They want me to establish an emotional connection. But what my male bosses do not understand is, vulnerability does not always carry the same meaning depending on who is showing it. A man in a leadership position can admit uncertainty and people often interpret it as authenticity. A woman in a leadership position can do the same thing, and while people may show empathy in the moment, and I believe many genuinely do, there is often another calculation happening quietly in the background. Is she overwhelmed? Is she weak? Did she really know what she was doing? Maybe that sounds cynical, but when you have lived inside these environments long enough, you notice patterns. You start understanding why many women become careful. It is not because women naturally want to be guarded. Sometimes the armor is something we build because we learned that walking around without it has consequences.

One of the ideas Liu puts forward in the book with some statistics is, lesser percentage of women have sponsors, and there is a distinction between mentors and sponsors. I think many people, especially women, are given the advice: “Find a mentor.” And that is good advice. A mentor can teach you, guide you, help you avoid mistakes. But Liu says women do find good mentors, but successful men usually have sponsors not mentors. A sponsor is someone who puts their own credibility behind you. Someone who says your name when you are not in the room. Many people who succeed have had someone along the way who opened a door. The myth of the completely self-made person is one of our favorite stories because it makes success feel clean and simple. We are all standing on somebody else’s shoulders, whether we like admitting it or not.

The Arianna Huffington story about burnout also felt painfully familiar. We have built a culture where exhaustion is often treated as evidence of commitment. The person answering emails at midnight is dedicated. The person who never takes a break is ambitious. The person who sacrifices everything is serious. But sometimes people succeed despite those sacrifices, not because of them. There is a difference. 

I do have some complicated feelings about Liu’s book-title though, the phrase “take back your power” has the danger of making everything an individual responsibility. Yes, people need agency. Yes, we cannot spend our entire lives waiting for someone else to rescue us. At some point, you have to speak, act, take chances, and move forward. 

But sometimes the issue is not that someone lacks confidence. Sometimes the environment is actually difficult. A person can be resilient and still be exhausted. A person can be capable and still be fighting unnecessary battles. I have no interest in telling women, “Just be tougher and adapt.” That is how people end up spending 30 years becoming excellent at tolerating things they should have questioned. But I also believe in the power of individual choice. There is a moment where you stop waiting for permission.

So after reading Take Back Your Power, I do not think the lesson is simply “be more powerful.” That feels like a very corporate interpretation of a much deeper idea. The more interesting question is: what kind of power are we actually trying to build? The power to impress people? The power to win every argument? The power to finally prove ourselves to everyone who underestimated us? 

Or something quieter? The power to speak honestly. The power to create. The power to stop shrinking. The power to live a life that actually feels like yours. Maybe taking back your power is not about becoming someone bigger. Maybe it is about spending less energy pretending to be smaller.

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Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging, a book review

TRIBE: Why Your Great-Grandmother Was Happier Than You (And She Had to Churn Her Own Butter)

I have been thinking about our pursuit of happiness. Not a particularly original thought. Everyone thinks about happiness. We have apps for it. TED talks. Life coaches who charge $200 an hour to tell us mindful gratitude is the answer while we sit in traffic behind a guy texting and driving a Cyberjunk.

Sebastian Junger has written a book that suggests the problem might be simpler than we think. Junger’s 2016 book Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging is essentially 150 pages of anthropological evidence that modern civilization might be the longest-running practical joke in human history, and the punchline is us sitting alone in our climate-controlled boxes wondering why we feel so empty.

The central thesis hits you with the realization that your great-grandmother who raised nine kids during the Depression was probably more content than you with your meditation app and ergonomic desk chair. Junger presents the mind-bending historical fact that white settlers captured by Native American tribes - even those taken as adults - often refused to return to "civilized" society when given the chance. These weren't Stockholm syndrome cases; they genuinely preferred native American life to their former European-American existence. Meanwhile, the reverse almost never happened. Junger discusses how the human experience is profoundly shaped by our need for genuine community bonds that modern society has systematically demolished.

Modern loneliness has a particular quality. It's not the loneliness of being actually alone, say, a lighthouse keeper or a long-distance runner. It's the loneliness of being surrounded by people who don't really see you. Your LinkedIn network of 500+ connections is probably making you lonelier than a hermit.

Another interesting observation is modern western culture is the only culture in human history that forces babies to sleep alone. This started with Northern European societies. Now it's standard Western parenting. We put newborns in separate rooms so they can "learn to self-soothe." We buy monitors to watch them from another room. We have apps that track their breathing patterns.

The rest of the world thinks we've lost our minds.

Every other society lets children sleep with parents until the children decide they don't want to. The idea of making the most vulnerable humans on Earth sleep in isolation strikes other cultures as cruel. We call it independence training. We begin the separation process before babies can even hold up their heads.

Even more disturbing is Junger's documentation of how crisis brings out the best in people, and how much they miss it when it's gone. During World War II, something unexpected happened in London. As the Blitz intensified, depression rates plummeted. Suicide dropped. Crime decreased. Mental hospitals reported fewer patients intake. The most dangerous neighborhoods saw the biggest improvements in mental health. This is not because suffering is good. This is because shared suffering creates bonds that individual comfort cannot.

Consider the modern American male. No initiation ceremony. No rite of passage. No moment when the community says, "Congratulations, you're officially not a boy anymore, here's your man card."

So he joins the military. Or doesn't, and spends his thirties playing video games while his mother does his laundry and wonders where she went wrong. Then we end up living in cities where we don't know our neighbors' names. Survival depends on credit scores and whether our health insurance covers therapy. 

The uncomfortable truth Junger presents is that we've created a society optimized for individual comfort and security while accidentally destroying the social bonds that make life feel worth living. Junger argues that we're all suffering from a kind of cultural PTSD. Not from trauma, but from disconnection. Not from what happened to us, but from what we've lost.

The solution is not to romanticize the past or abandon civilization. The solution is to understand what we've traded away. And maybe, occasionally, to trade it back. To choose inconvenience over isolation. Community over comfort. Interdependence over independence. To remember that humans are tribal animals and that our cellphone cannot substitute for the pack.

It cannot. We know this. We've always known this. We just keep forgetting to remember.

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Pat Tillman, Jon Krakauer and my forays into Americans writing about Americans

The last couple of years I've been trying to read more writing by contemporary U.S. authors writing about contemporary U.S events. Since reading had taken a backseat with most of my time spent perusing the world using the prosthetic extension of a cellphone attached to my body at all times, the exploration of American literature had not been really successful until the last few weeks. 

I started with one of my favorite non-fiction authors, the mountaineer from Massachusetts, Jon Krakauer and his book about the all American hero, Pat Tillman, 'Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman'. 

More than twenty years ago, I had followed the story of Pat Tillman when he made national headlines ditching a lucrative NFL career and signed up in the Army and got sent to Afghanistan along with his brother Kevin Tillman. I knew nothing about football, but I had cable TV and Netflix movies were being delivered as CDs in red envelopes which was slower than cable content delivery. 

Tillman seemed like an interesting guy - an All American boy, a footballer who read books and sounded deep! A very interesting and rare combo and he was close to me in age. If he had an Instagram or YouTube channel, I would have been a subscriber.

But when things went horrifically wrong for Pat Tillman, I stopped following the story. The man was gone. A human being with so much potential for changing humanity whose life has been cut short and people were bickering to profit and spin his story into something it was not. I felt bad for his poor family, but the world moved on, so did I. While I knew Jon Krakauer had come out with his book about Tillman a few years later, for some unexplainable reason I didn't want to read it, maybe I didn't want to read about a good man's story with a fatal irreversible ending.

I read/listened to and finished "Where Men Win Glory : The Odyssey of Pat Tillman" yesterday. It was everything I thought it would be and more. It is a splendid homage to Tillman and I appreciate Krakauer writing it. Just like he wrote about Christopher McCandless's life and story in 'Into the Wild'. These men and women's lives are the stories that need to be told and heard, to enrich our human experience and for us to understand and be guided by these unique people. These are our contemporaries who went down these daringly different paths so that we do not have to, but yet left us with valuable life lessons. I am glad to have lived during the time these men lived. 

For the fact-hoarder that I am, the book also provided a lot of setting-the-background type of historical information like the 2000 Bush-Gore election, Afghanistan being the graveyard of empires - with focus on Soviet occupation and American presence, the tribalism of Afghanistan, the Pashtun code (Pashtunwali) , the different factions of Islamic fighters in that area and their history, US deployments, US bases and their involvement since 1980s till mid-2000s in that region.

Salute, Pat Tillman, for choosing the difficult path rarely chosen. Krakauer had to rely on Pat's journal entries and notes as Tillman family refused to contribute to Krakauer's effort. Pat's mother had her own book published about Pat. 

Maybe I will move onto Krakauer's Missoula or Under the Banner of Heaven next. Although I am about midway into Erik Larson's rundown to the start of the Civil War, 'The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War.' I need to finish that first.

“Man, supposing you and I, escaping this battle, would be able to live on forever, ageless, immortal, so neither would I myself go on fighting in the foremost nor would I urge you into the fighting where men win glory. But now, seeing that the spirits of death stand close about us in their thousands, no man can turn aside nor escape them, let us go on and win glory for ourselves, or yield it to others.”
- Homer, The Iliad

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Best of 2024: Movies, Music & Reading

Here are some movies, music and books that caught my eye/ears in 2024.

Movies: Most of the movies in the list are from Malayalam. Malayalam movies have seen a remarkable resurgence in the last decade. In contrast  Bollywood or Hindi movies appears to be in a state of creative stagnation, trying to lift themes and stories from the Telugu industry (Tollywood) and miserably failing. 

I found myself struggling to recollect any Hindi movies I had watched in the past year, let alone any that left a lasting impression. This is a far cry from the vibrant era spanning the early 2000s to the mid-2010s, when Bollywood flourished with an array of memorable works.

Some of the movies in my list below were not released in 2024, I happened to watch them this year. But most of them are.

Bhoothakalam (Malayalam, 2022): One of the best paranormal movies in Malayalam that I've ever watched. Here is my review.

Premulu (Malayalam, 2024) : A chick-flick, a light-entertainer, third in a series - you decide. My review is here.

Civil War (English USA, 2024) :  I have been burrowing deep into the annals of American civil war, abolitionists and Abraham Lincoln this year. Coincidentally I watched this movie, which is unrelated to 150+ year old original version of civil war, months before I started down the rabbit hole of the 1860s civil war. Same land, different time, similar divides. My review.

Kishkindha Kaandam (Malayalam, 2024): Probably one of the best films that Malayalam produced this year. 

Bramayugam (Malayalam, 2024): Shot in the same location as Kishkindha Kaandam, but set centuries apart and brilliantly shot in black-n-white. Mammootty lords over a mad dark mansion and the movie, my review is here.

Bougainvillea (Malayalam, 2024): A stylish movie from Amal Neerad with his wife and actor Jyothirmayi rocking grey hair and her character and Kunchako Boban presenting new dimensions to his actor persona. Both actors have given great performances in an unconventional story which fails to hold together towards the end. But I loved the slick, urbane presentation. Maybe the allure of Jyothirmayi's silver strands will urge older folks, esp. Malayali men with sagging jaws and creased cheeks to abandon the harshness of jet black hair-dyes and embrace the timeless sophistication of grey hair. Sthuthi!

Barbie (English USA, 2023) : Barbie is a visually captivating and cleverly subversive film, blending playful nostalgia with sharp commentary on identity and societal expectations. It’s a whimsical yet thought-provoking exploration that transcends its toy-doll origins, offering a refreshing take on modern femininity

Society of the Snow (Spanish, Netflix, 2023): Alive by Piers Paul Reed was one of the books that I read in my teens that left a deep impression in my mind. It was about a team of Uruguayan rugby players whose plane crashed in the remote Andes and narrated their resilience in the face of unimaginable odds. Hollywood made a version of this real life survival story in the 90s starring Ethan Hawke. But Netflix's take on this incident, Society of the Snow, is the best and gripping version of this raw survival tale till now.

Sector 36 (2024): This is the only Hindi movie in my list, a Netflix production starring Deepak Dobriyal and Vikrant Massey. 

Music:  One of my favorite bands from the past released a new album this year, after long. Linkin Park's From Zero has head bangers like Emptiness Machine and Heavy is the Crown, along with many other great tracks, which makes it an almost no-skip album.

Shaboozey is my discovery of the year. It is like he found a place in music we didn't know existed and made himself at home there, at the confluence of hip-hop, country and pop. My favorite song of Shaboozey is Let it Burn.

Books : I hardly read any books this year and I am yet to finish the last two, but do plan to finish them 

1. And There was Light  - Jon Meacham
2. Circe - Madeline Miller
3. The Covenant of Water - Abraham Verghese
4. How to Hide an Empire - Daniel Immerwahr

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Love and Loss: Amy Bloom's In Love & Netflix's One Day

Reading Amy Bloom's In Love helped me understand Robin William's final act. While there are nine states (Washington, Oregon, California, Hawaii, Colorado, Montana, New Jersey, Maine and Vermont) and the District of Columbia which have right to die laws, you cannot have a physician assisted suicide without satisfying certain conditions. First, you have to be a resident of one of these states to have the right to die, more importantly you need to get medically assessed as having only six months to live. Which means you have to be almost at death's door to use this right-to-die card to have a physician-assisted suicide in the US of A.  Incurable degenerative diseases like Lewy body dementia (that Robin Williams had) or Alzheimer's or Parkinson's that will slowly hollow out a person over years are not excuses good enough to have the right to die in any of the nine states or DC. This is where Switzerland steps in.  Remember the name Dignitas and Pegasos, just in case.

Just in case was the reason why I decided to read Amy Bloom's In Love after I chanced upon a blurb about the book somewhere. Memoirs focusing on a single event in a writer's life and its aftermath is not my favorite form of non-fiction, but the information provided by the author and her style of writing kept In Love engaging for me.

During the same period I was going through Ms. Bloom's love-n-loss heavy memoir I also accidently started watching a chick-lit(?) series One Day on Netflix. Like Amy Bloom, Ambika Mod's Emma Morley is a bookish ethnic girl who becomes a writer and finds a soulmate in handsome, British upper class Dexter Mayhew.

Emma and Dex in One Day

One Day is based on the book of the same name written by David Nicholls, and tells the story of Emma and Dexter who meet and spend a night together on their last day at the university in 1988 and decide to meet each other every year afterwards, on the same day. There was also a 2011 movie based on the novel, starring Anne Hathaway as Emma. 

I loved the way Emma's character is written. Her one-liners are profoundly deep and funny. Leo Woodall's Dex is hurtlingly handsome and posh. They are from the opposite ends of the spectrum, both socially and intellectually and we, the viewers, desperately want them to be together, to see how it will all turn out. The writing and the script makes sure the audience are invested in Emma and Dex although the plot line of boy and girl from different sides of the track is an over-used one.

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Circe by Madeline Miller

I met many Greek Gods for the first time last week. Thank you, Circe and Madeline Miller. I did not reach this far in life without hearing about Achilles' heel or Midas's touch or Herculean effort or Pandora's box, but they were just that - phrases, bearing the stamp of western civilization's greatest mythology, which was a gift from the Greeks. We all know what they say about Greeks bearing gifts.

This is the first book of fiction I have read in a long while and relished, even though it is very close to the genre of fantasy fiction I absolutely abhor. I am humbled once again by the realization that there are no absolutes, everything is relative. 

There are authors who are masters of retelling the classics. Madeline Miller is one of them. In Circe, she recasts the most infamous female character from Homer's The Odyssey and makes her a free woman, thinker, the maker of her own destiny and the world's first witch. Circe, opens with the sentence, "When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist." Which was a witch.

Through Circe's magical life journey clueless readers like me get  a crash course in who is who of Greek mythology. If I still don't get it, my son has recommended Percy Jackson's Greek Gods, although I don't think I will need it. Madeline Miller is an extraordinary story-teller, her prose is lush and breathtaking. Circe is a beautifully written novel, where you as the reader gets a front row seat to watch the parade of gods and most of them are as human - fallible, vain and unique as we are.

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Best Books: My 2023 list

This is one of those customary end of the year lists.  My 'book' reading habit is on life support so I thought it would be a short list I could easily convert into a quick post. I could put the blame of the slow demise of my book reading skills on aging, doom-scrolling internet forums where wisdom (debatable) is delivered through strangers' comments in 8.25 seconds or lesser, or my ADD. Or it could be because the same content delivered by books is now being delivered to the same dopamine centers of the brain the by streaming services?

All the books I read, I consider my best reading of the year. Otherwise I would not have made it to the end as there are more books I gave up in the first chapter or two than the total number of books I read this year.

Here are the four books I read this year and all of them are remarkable because they were able to keep my attention till the very last page. There is also a bonus book - a book you should not read, even if you maybe interested in trains like I am.

Deepti Naval's  A Country Called Childhood : A memoir

Deepti Naval is one of my favorite actors and intellectuals of Indian cinema. A Country Called Childhood is my kind of memoir - it is not about trauma or addiction or tragedy or conquering adversity. It is about the actor's childhood in northern India,  simple, and minimal yet resonant with images of the fifties and sixties India. This is how you should write about your childhood and this is how Indians writing in English should write in English.

Tony Joseph's  Early Indians : The Story of Our Ancestors and Where We Came From

I have written a review of Early Indians here  >> The journalist author Tony Joseph focuses on the group(s) that migrated out of Africa, in three different waves, at three different time periods and became the ancestors of all the people currently inhabiting the Indian sub-continent. It is an extremely interesting and easy to read book based on anthropological, archaeological findings till now and the explosion of DNA evidence and research papers published since 2015 based on these DNA findings. 

Balachandran Chullikkad's  Chidambara Smarana (Malayalam, memoir)

Balachandran Chullikkad's memoir Chidambara Smarana (pub. 01/2001) reads like a struggling young man's journal entries from 1980-90's India. The rest of my review here.

Andy Weir's  Project Hail Mary 

This is my first Andy Weir. Probably the last too.  I was impressed by The Martian, the movie and thought I should give Project Hail Mary a try before it became a movie. Project Hail Mary is based on a good (not novel) concept with a Marvel-esque hero who is a modest middle school science teacher, written to succeed. This unassuming superhero who wears his cape and underwear inside his spacesuit would have failed in real world without access to Youtube, Google Translate, Google Search, chatGPT and Wikipedia, but for the purposes of this book, all of these sites reside in his head.

The bonus book you should stay away from if you have a liking for Indian non fiction and a sweet spot for trains is The Great Indian Railways: A Cultural Biography by Arup K. Chatterjee.  The author seems to have been too wrapped up in his own 'brilliant' command of English, which was too pedantic, stiff and graceless that I had to give it up after a few pages. Here is Chatterjee starting a paragraph talking about something. It has to be about trains as the book is about them. I think this paragraph may even have something to do with train dining cars.                                                                        

"Second, it perpetuates the reification of labour. Accordingly labour forces of railroad history are meant to be usurped into a memory of personal aristocratic adventures. The motif of culinary details has a very subtle role in accentuating architecture, and those of architecture in establishing an enduring imperial monumentality."

What the heck was that?

This is the problem I have with many Indian writers who write in English. Their tone is pedantic and disconnected. Their prose is full of long winded sentences that lose their meaning on the way while the writers are busy showing off their mastery of Queen's English. They should all read Shashi Tharoor or Suketu Mehta or Deepti Naval. It could be their new year resolution.

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Chidambara Smarana : A review of Balachandran Chullikkad's memoir

Balachandran Chullikkad's memoir Chidambara Smarana (pub. 01/2001) reads like a struggling young man's journal entries from 1980-90's India. Characters played by Mohanlal, Sreenivasan, Mukesh and co. in the late eighties and nineties' Malayalam movies would be Chullikkad if they were devoid of their trademark humor and had overdosed on pathos. The glass seems to be half empty or almost completely empty through Chullikkad's lens/pen whereas Dasan and Vijayan saw it half full, almost abrim with the invisible possibility of more water that may fill and cause an overflow of good fortune at any moment. None of that optimism can be seen in Chidambara Smarana (literal transl~Memory of Chidambaram.)

Balachandran Chullikkad was a fire brand young poet in the eighties and nineties Kerala. Although I was a reader of Malayalam poetry during those days, somehow I seem to have missed most of his poetry. I had read some of his contemporaries like V. Madhusoodanan Nair, Sugatha Kumari and Kureeppuzha Sreekumar but the only poem I remember of Chullikkad is Ghazal. Over the years Ghazal had become a personal meme of sort which we would bring up any time there is a Hindustani singer in the frame, in front of a predominantly Malayali audience, "there goes Ghulam Ali, singing his wail of a ghazal."

A disturbing undercurrent I noticed in Chullikkad's writing is his sterile, almost impaired depiction of women. He might be afflicted with what could be the opposite of Oedipus complex -  utter hate towards mother and motherly figures. According to my armchair psycho analysis conducted a couple of minutes ago with the aid of YouTube, this was probably as a result of his strained relationship with his mother and grand mother during his formative years. He never recovered, and not only that, there is a lack of remorse or wisdom that comes with age, quite unlike what you would naturally expect from a sensitive poetic soul like him. Not all poets are made equal, some are made like James Dean, Balachandran Chullikkad is Malayalam literature's OG rebel without a cause.

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Early Indians by Tony Joseph : A book review

The oldest scientifically dated remains of a modern human aka HOMO SAPIEN - which is you, me and every human being currently alive on this planet, is 300,000 years old, found in Jebel Irhoud in Morocco. When you consider the enormity and scale of that timeline you will realize the most popular member of the religious trinity group - J.C and the original fashionista Cleopatra left the stage just a heartbeat ago. Only a mere 2000 years have passed since they handed over the mic to Jay Z and Beyoncé.

Our kind, Homo Sapiens (this is important since there were several other kinds of human species coexisting 100 - 200,000+ years with Sapiens like Homo Erectus, Neanderthals and Denisovans), ventured out of Africa to Asia first and Europe later between 40 - 60,000 years ago. Americas being the last continent to be settled by the journeying biped Sapiens 16,000 years ago.

All people outside of Africa in the world today are descended from a single African woman of L3 haplogroup. In a similar vein all people outside of Africa (i.e. modern human = Home Sapiens) are descended from a single man of CT haplogroup. In short our differences are only skin deep and race is a powerful illusion that everyone of us has bought into.

The journalist author Tony Joseph focuses on the group(s) that migrated out of Africa, in three different waves, at three different time periods and became the ancestors of all the people currently inhabiting the Indian sub-continent. It is an extremely interesting and easy to read book based on anthropological, archaeological findings till now and the explosion of DNA evidence and research papers published since 2015 based on these DNA findings. 

What Early Indians is not is, it is not an international pop-sci best seller like the Sapiens with its far-fetched and reductionist claims which made Sapiens the non-fiction counterpart of Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist, in my mind. Hot garbage, Early Indians is not. If you have roots in the Indian Subcontinent and if your attention span can hold for about 270+ pages, it does not have to be in one sitting, this is a book worth reading.

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Flowers For Algernon : Bouquets or Brickbats?

Flowers for Algernon, the Nebula award winning 1959 sci-fi novel by Daniel Keyes is a crowd favorite for the last half century. There were several reasons I should not have tried reading it, starting from my inability to read fiction as years progress being the main one. It did not help that the book belonged to category of 'scientific fiction' and was not written by a couple of SF writers that I could understand, namely Douglas Adams or Philip K. Dick. Nevertheless none of these stopped me from attempting to read this book, as the whole internet is ga-ga about Flowers for Algernon, I caught a case of FOMO. 

Little did I know this book is the American cousin of Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist, another novel that has been anchoring the book shelves around the world with un-shakeable gravitas and giving their readers self importance and reading participation trophies since it came out in 1993. 

While The Alchemist has a global following like soccer, Flowers for Algernon is very American like 'American football' (the one that uses hands to play.) Keyes went as far back as Mark Twain to adopt Huckleberry Finn's lingo, which had made reading Huckleberry Finn a torture for a non-native English speaker like me, who had to read aloud the mis-spelled words to understand what Huck Finn was saying. It is the same with Charlie, the protagonist in Flowers for Algernon. The first several chapters, the one dimensional Charlie jots in his journal is torture for speed readers, grammar-nazis, spell-checkers and me. 

The novel also has a distinct fifties-sixties anti-feminist vibe to it, like the Catcher in the Rye or One  Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. A few chapters in, Charlie is seen progressing through his Holden Caulfield phase - a moody, self-absorbed, misogynistic male. There are archetypal female characters propping Charlie up as he goes up and down the slippery IQ slope.  It was probably an edgy read in the sixties and seventies. It reads very dated as in outdated and uni-dimensional now. I was expecting a good cry at the end as this was supposedly the reaction most readers had in the end, after being profoundly moved by the plight of Charlie. I almost cried over the time I wasted reading Daniel Keyes essential soft-core reading for sixties dudes.

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One Hundred Years with The Problem of China

One hundred years ago, Bertrand Russell identified the potential, the promise and the puzzle that is China in his book "The Problem of China." Russell is a multi-dimensional personality who has started to interest me during my recent expeditions in philosophy. I picked 'The Problem of China', on a whim to understand Russell - the philosopher thinker, born to an aristocratic English family, curious what he had read in the tea leaves about the slumbering dragon China was at the time. 

Bertrand Russell spent 10 months in China starting in the fall of 1920 to July 1921 teaching philosophy at Peking University. He arrived in China towards the end of the May Fourth movement. Chinese intellectuals were looking at Russell and other western philosophers like John Dewey to propose solutions for 'fixing' China. While Russell did not provide any silver bullet cures to fix the Chinese system, he remained a strong advocate of China in the West for the rest of his life.

Bertrand Russell (seated on the right) in China

1920s China is a version of China that no longer exists except in history books. Yet I found Russell's century old observations and analysis prophetic and far-sighted. It also gave me a hint why Chinese people and Chinese culture with its invisible roots still binding it to Confucianism would accept certain things that people living in other modern societies would not accept without a fight. 

Excerpts from the book:

"In China, though wars and revolutions have occurred constantly, Confucian calm has survived them all, making them less terrible for the participants, and making all who were not immediately involved hold aloof."

"It has been customary in China, for many centuries, for the literati to be pure Confucians, skeptical in religion but not in morals, while the rest of the population believed and practiced all three religions simultaneously. The Chinese have not the belief, which we owe to the Jews, that if one religion is true, all others must be false. At the present day, however, there appears to be very little in the way of religion in China"

For the world of the future to be in balance, this is what Bertrand Russell proposed in 1922

"in the long run, the Chinese cannot escape economic domination by foreign Powers unless China becomes military or the foreign Powers become Socialistic, because the capitalist system involves in its very essence a predatory relation of the strong towards the weak, internationally as well as nationally. A strong military China would be a disaster; therefore Socialism in Europe and America affords the only ultimate solution."

Remember the paragraph below was written right after WWI. No historian could write about China without delving into its relationship with Japan.

"A war between America and Japan would be a very terrible thing in itself, and a still more terrible thing in its consequences. It would destroy Japanese civilization, ensure the subjugation of China to Western culture, and launch America upon a career of world-wide militaristic imperialism."

Here is prophet Russell again,

"To sum up: the real government of the world is in the hands of the big financiers, except on questions which rouse passionate public interest. No doubt the exclusion of Asiatics from America and the Dominions is due to popular pressure, and is against the interests of big finance. "

Why are Chinese people the way the way they are?

"In Chinese poetry there is an apparent absence of passion which is due to the same practice of under-statement. They consider that a wise man should always remain calm, and though they have their passionate moments (being in fact a very excitable race), they do not wish to perpetuate them in art, because they think ill of them....In art they aim at being exquisite, and in life at being reasonable. There is no admiration for the ruthless strong man, or for the unrestrained expression of passion...

...Nothing astonishes a European more in the Chinese than their patience.....They think not in decades, but in centuries. They have been conquered before, first by the Tartars and then by the Manchus; but in both cases they absorbed their conquerors. Chinese civilization persisted, unchanged; and after a few generations the invaders became more Chinese than their subjects...."

Russell's outlook for China from a century ago

"China is as yet only slightly industrialized, but the industrial possibilities of the country are very great, and it may be taken as nearly certain that there will be a rapid development throughout the next few decades."

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Unsettled Ground : Notes on a book

A county, a college, a national forest, public schools and dozens of other enterprises including an upscale hotel and a church memorialize the nineteenth century Protestant missionary Marcus Whitman.  He would have been a footnote in history if he and his wife and eleven other white people were not killed by Cayuse Indians in 1847 in Walla Walla valley in the Pacific Northwest.  

I picked up this book by Cassandra Tate on one of my rare in-person visits to the  Public Library. I had no particular subject or book in mind. After a few minutes of wandering around I found myself in the local section - Washington based books and this book caught my eye. I finished it a few days ago, reading it over a period of several weeks because unlike the ebooks I read these days, a hard copy book cannot be read in the dark. 

Coincidentally I finished the book on Thanksgiving day, the day marking the autumn harvest feast shared between the native Americans and white colonists at Plymouth, Massachusetts. Former President, Warren G. Harding said, "I like the story of Whitman. If it isn't true, it ought to be." Thus the story of a hero (non-existent in reality) was created, a convenient portrait (there were no portraits or drawings of the Whitmans) of a chiseled white frontiersman missionary was written and sculpted into a nation's memory and museums.  In an era when across the United States the statues of old White men are being toppled by the new generation trying to re-align history and correct past mistakes, Unsettled Ground is a timely read. 

Like all the historical stories painted by the victors, the stories of native Americans and white colonists' interactions have always presented Indian tribes as the bad guys, attacking and revolting against the white pioneers and well meaning white missionaries.  The Whitman story is no different. Tate's well researched, even-keeled book prompts a revisit to learn the truth about the complex dynamics of Natives and white settlers, from the perspective of an infamous event, which led to the canonization of the wrong hero.

Here are a few intriguing facts I learnt from the book:

• Tate points out, when American Indians killed whites it was called a “massacre”; when whites killed Indigenous people, it often gets labeled a “battle.”
• Catholic missionaries had more success and rapport with the native Americans than Protestant missionaries in the American west because of the high threshold of entry (into Christian religion) that Protestant missionaries set for the new converts. The Catholics on the other hand were ready to baptize and convert even those 'heathens' who were ordered to be hung to death the next day, if the heathen wished to embrace Christianity.
• In early nineteenth  century it was more difficult and time consuming to complete one's theological education and be ordained a priest or a minister (took 7-8 years) than to study and qualify as a physician which only took about four years max.
• The focus of Christian missionaries in the Americas was to change the wandering, hunter-gatherer lifestyle of the native people and convert them into agriculturists who would stay put, farm the land, produce and procreate in one place.
• Oregon Spectator talking about the native Americans, "for the barbarian murderers and violators, let them be pursued with unrelenting hatred, let them be hunted as beasts of prey, let their name and race be blotted from the face of the earth, and the places that once knew them, know them no more forever."
• The Whitmans were markedly unsuccessful  as missionaries - in their 11 years in the Pacific Northwest they failed to convert even a single Indian.

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Plague64 & Covid19: How Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Year of the Plague foretells our 21st century reactions to the global pandemic

I try to stay clear of fads of all kind if I can. It is a bit easier for me than the general populace because I do not have any social media accounts to be bombarded by trends from friends' feeds, tweets or stories. The only place I might be ambushed by fads are the streaming platforms (Netflix, are you a verb yet?) and books. All I have to do is turn a blind eye to all the pandemic movies, books and documentaries in 2020 or not take a peek at any of the 9/11 documentaries/movies in 2021. I made my first Dalgona coffee yesterday after making sure the Dalgona fad was dead beyond resuscitation. A year after a fad has passed seems a reasonable time frame to check back up on it and not be branded a blind follower if you want to try it out.

Now that the one year self-imposed steer-clear date has passed for catching upon pandemic literature and media, on a mission to elevate my literIQ, I started browsing the classics catalog at our public library's online offerings. Half of which I had to dismiss because I had read the abridged illustrated versions of these in my youth and had marked these off as read. That was when I chanced upon Daniel Defoe's lesser known non-fictional fiction, or historical non-fiction/biography as we call it these days, "A Journal of the Plague Year" published in 1722. 

A note about Defoe before we move on.  Introducing the Penguin edition of the Plague Year in 1966, Anthony Burgess wrote: “Defoe was our first great novelist because he was our first great journalist...because he was born not into literature but into life.” 

Defoe was born into a non-aristocratic family with anti-establishments roots and had a liberal upbringing. He was a trader, a journalist, a pamphleteer, a spy and a writer who preferred modern languages rather than the classic languages that the ' true' writers were expected to write in those days. 

 

He produced an array of various forms of literature from pamphlets to novels under two hundred different pseudonyms. Robinson Crusoe is often considered the first English novel, the work that defined the literary device we call a novel now.  It was marketed as the strange and surprising adventures of a sailor marooned on a lonely uninhabited island for eight and twenty years, written by 'himself'. Defoe was the father of the line of writing which we now categorize as historical non-fiction, crime, pop science and travel non-fiction - the kind Eric Larson, Laura Hillenbrand, Bill Bryson, Jared Diamond, Jon Krakauer and Yuval Noah Hariri excel in these days.

A Journal of the Year of the Plague is in the form of an eye-witness account of the plague outbreak in 1665 London. Defoe must have been 5 years old at the time and had not yet added "De" to his last name to make it more classy. The novel was published in the form of a journal of a person with initials H.F and is presumed to be that of Henry Foe, Daniel Defoe's uncle who had lived and worked in London at the time of the infamous bubonic plague outbreak. Defoe also drew on historical records (broadsides), medical pamphlets and Bills of Mortality published by local parish authorities for counts and tables of plague deaths by parish and by chronology, that appear through out the book.

350+ years - light years in terms of technological advancement, vaccines, Instagram and Ivermectin separate the 1665 London Bubonic plague event from the global Covid19 pandemic of 2020. But as I read Defoe's uncle's journal it feels like our responses as a species have not changed even an iota. 

Here are some of the recurring patterns of human behavior and our predictable reactions, as witnessed during the plague of 1665:

Asymptomatic and symptomatic people bolting to new places to escape the plague, not knowing they were already infected and thus infecting whole new communities : "...this Frenchman who died in Bearbinder Lane was one who, having lived in Long Acre, near the infected houses, had removed for fear of the distemper, not knowing that he was already infected."

Everyone and their dog baking bread and hoarding groceries: "I went and bought two sacks of meal, and for several weeks, having an oven, we baked all our own bread; also I bought malt, and brewed as much beer as all the casks I had would hold, and which seemed enough to serve my house for 5-6 weeks; also I laid in a quantity of salt butter and Cheshire cheese.."

The plague raged violently among butchers as meat was one of the modes of transmission. So they were using touchless transaction and hand sanitizers even back then:  "When anyone bought a joint of meat in the market they would not take it off the butcher's hand, but took it off the hooks themselves. On the other hand, the butcher would not touch the money, but have it put into a pot full of vinegar, which he kept for that purpose. The buyer carried always small money to make up and odd sum, that they might take no change. They carried bottles of scents and perfumes in their hand, and all the means that could be used were used.."

True nature of death concealed, fudging the numbers or under-reporting death toll: "and at the Lord Mayor's request, it was found there were twenty more who were really dead of the plague in that parish, but had been set down of the spotted-fever or other distempers, besides others concealed."

Travel restrictions and negative test results required for traveling which first started as a rumor: "..an order of the Government was to be issued out to place turnpikes and barriers on the road to prevent people travelling, and that the town on the road would not suffer people from London to pass for fear of bringing infection along with them.....the hurry of the people was such for some weeks there was no getting at the Lord Mayor's door without exceeding difficulty; there were such pressing and crowding there to get passes and certificates of health for such as travelled abroad, for without these there was no being admitted to pass through the towns upon the road, or to lodge in any inn"

Broadway and movie theaters shut down:  "..that all plays, bear-baitings, games, singing of ballads, buckler-play or such-like cause of assemblies of people be utterly prohibited.."

Restaurants and pubs shut down: That all public feasting...be forborne till further order and allowance....that disorderly tippling in taverns, ale-houses, coffee-houses and cellars be severely looked unto, as the common sin of this time and greatest occasion of dispersing the plague..."

Lock down at home: "as for my little family, having thus, as I have said, laid in a store of bread, butter, cheese and beer, I took my friend and physician's advice and locked myself up and my family and resolved to suffer the hardship of living a few months without flesh-meat, rather than to purchase it and hazard our lives."

Trade comes to a halt: "..the trading nation of Europe were all afraid of us; no port of France, or Holland, or Spain, or Italy would admit our (English) ships or correspond with us...the inconveniences in Spain and Portugal were still greater, for they would by no means suffer our ships,....to come into their ports, much less to unlade."

A decrease in the weekly death counts and people throw caution to the wind, ignoring the warnings of 17th century Dr. Faucis: "....people's running so rashly into danger, giving up all their former cautions and care, and all the shyness which they used to practise, depending that the sickness would not reach them - or that if it did, they should not die. The physicians opposed this thoughtless humor the people with all their might and gave out printed directions, spreading them all over the city and suburbs, advising the people to continue reserved and to use still the utmost caution in their ordinary conduct, notwithstanding the decrease of distemper, terrifying them with the danger of bringing a relapse upon the whole city, and telling them how such a relapse might be more fatal dangerous than the whole visitation that had been already;"

A Journal of the Plague Year is an amazingly clear and modern work of literature from three centuries ago, by a man who gave no f**ks what people thought. He was probably the only man who was sentenced to the pillory where everyone who is sent to public humiliation at the pillory is usually pelted with rotten eggs, people threw flowers at him.  The Plague journal, supposedly a fictional work, has been analyzed by researchers and scholars for historical accuracy and they have concluded that it is an honest, factual and realistic portrayal of the 1665 Plague epidemic. They did this by comparing the Journal to the weekly bills of mortality published by the parishes and real eye-witness accounts like Samuel Pepys' diary which was not discovered or decoded at the time Defoe was alive. Color me a Defoe fan.

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Thoreau de la Walden : The Hipster from Concord

Walden is my chill-with-a-book book, my meditation guide, my psychedelic trip without psychedelics. I took that trip again this weekend and I want other people out there in the vast wide world to know that you too can take tickets for the same ride. That is why I am writing about Thoreau and Walden, lying in my backyard hammock at the dark hour of 11 pm, listening to crickets, enjoying the slightly nippy late summer air – it is as much Walden as it can get in the rural Pacific Northwest.

Thoreau, came to me late in life. In my late thirties, I stumbled across Thoreau in my quest for a true American thinker, and found the first American anarchist. I realized that the concept of civil disobedience that I had credited Mahatma Gandhi with and on which much of India’s freedom movement had hinged on, got main street cred through Thoreau’s essay on Civil Disobedience in 1849, twenty years before Gandhi was born. When MLK referred back to Gandhi’s civil disobedience movement to push forward his dream of racial equality, the idea of civil disobedience completed a full circle. A modern American construct, expounded and practiced by Thoreau came back home to roost during the Civil Rights era.

The people who resemble Thoreau the closest in this day and age, to me, is not the Sierra Clubbers (for Thoreau is often credited as being one of the people who laid the foundation of the modern environmental movement) but the Antifa. I often feel that the black hoodied hipster with long hair from Portland (OR) protesting police brutality could be Thoreau, if he was present in the present day. When Thoreau defended John Brown in his ‘A Plea for Captain John Brown’ before even other fellow abolitionists would take up a stand for John Brown shows he was the original American anarchist and practiced what he preached.

Reading Walden again, I am struck by the timelessness of the work and how contemporary Thoreau sounds even now, almost two centuries after he had penned his masterpiece. Here he is anticipating the meat-free destiny of man kind, the creation of PETA, vegetarianism and alternative meat - “...whatever my own practice may be, I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of human race, in its gradual improvement, is to leave off eating animals….” He condemned hunting although he had been on hunting expeditions as a teen. Here is Thoreau again from Walden, “no humane being, past the thoughtless age of boyhood will wantonly murder any creature which holds its life by the same tenure that he does. The hare in its extremity cries like a child. I warn you, mothers, that my sympathies do not always make the usual philanthropic distinctions.”

Thoreau sounds relatable because there are a lot of similarities between his day and the times we are passing through now. Whether it is the millennials who cannot afford to move out of their parents’ homes or the matter of black lives being a hot topic again or the polarization of the nation into conservative south and liberal North/West, 150 years hence we are fighting about the same things and feeling their effect as Thoreau and the U.S populace did in the mid 1800s.

Thoreau lived at his family home, he worked at his family’s pencil factory, paid his rent to his family. Later on, he learned surveying to take it up a vocation. He is the millennial brother-in-law, who will baby sit your kids (he did this for Ralph Waldo Emerson’s kids) while you and your wife goes out on a date in town. He is the same millennial who abruptly quits the rat race to live off the grid in Alaska (Thoreau had to settle for Walden because Alaska was Russia’s at the time), in a tiny home he built all by himself. He was a minimalist, an environmentalist, an abolitionist fighting for the rights of slaves, a vegetarian, a tiny home builder building a home using recycled materials and a disobedient civilian before any of these were considered cool.

He was a white man from Massachusetts, who could quote Vishnu Purana in the 1850s. You have to understand Hare Krishna movement was still one hundred years in the future and Beatles was yet to discover Mahesh Yogi and transcendental meditation. Thoreau says that Vishnu Purana says (I have to take Thoreau’s word for it, despite being born in India, I have not read Vishnu Purana), “The house-holder is to remain in his courtyard as long as it takes to milk a cow or longer if he pleases, to await the arrival of a guest.”

Just like us, currently bewildered by shipping delays in Amazon and shocked by empty shelves at Walmart, Thoreau was utterly surprised by where the things for his daily use (in the days before his life at Walden) came from. Most of our stuff in 21^st century comes from China by the way. That’s why the shelves are looking forlorn at big box stores these days, thanks to the Covid triggered supply chain bottle-neck, Chinese govt. restrictions and to a small extent to that minor traffic incident at the Suez canal turnpike. Here is Thoreau again on learning the pots he used at home was made by an actual potter who lived in town and were not the ones passed on down unbroken from our Mesopotamian ancestors, “I had read of the potter’s clay and wheel in Scripture, but it had never occurred to me that the pots we use were not such as had come down unbroken from those days or grown on trees like gourds somewhere, and I was pleased to hear that so fictile an art was ever practiced in my neighborhood,” Thoreau could have made a solid career in stand-up comedy if he was alive now.

Many intellectuals classify Walden as fiction and Thoreau as a loser, a cynic disappointed by the system and the order of things. But Thoreau is much more than Walden. Walden is just a field-guide for all the could-have-beens if we were brave to jump off from the gerbil wheel we all are endlessly running on. Thoreau stands tall because we are still talking about him, the issues he stood for and the stands he had taken are still as relevant today as it was then. 

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My first impression of Silicon Valley vs Uncanny Valley : A Memoir by Anna Wiener

Fresh off the boat, San Francisco Bay Area / Silicon Valley was my first home in the US of A. Above is a screenshot of an old blog post from my now defunct Live Journal describing my very first impressions, written 4 years after the said impressions were first registered. The static nature of the content is a tell-tale sign that it belongs to a prehistoric time when blog posts and not reaction videos ruled the day. 

Silicon Valley was and is a bubble, floating in an ether of its own making, far above in the exosphere and beyond the comprehension of the rest of America and the world. It is a strange place full of contradictions that questions its own existence. Is it for real? How could such a place exist where a roof over your head - the rent of a one-bed apartment could set you back $4-5K/month easily but you could get a filling burrito from a hole in the wall eatery for $5?

Anna Wiener calls it the uncanny valley in her memoir, "Uncanny Valley." Documenting her move from East coast to SFO after accepting a job at an eBook startup,  Wiener's memoir provides access to the inside track of the Silicon valley in 2010s populated with 20-somethings. Reflecting on the peculiar feelings that Silicon Valley evokes, the title could also be a play on words pointing to Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori's original concept of the uncanny valley. 

You know you have arrived in downtown San Francisco if you can spot homeless people wearing T-shirts emblazoned with the logos of Silicon Valley companies taking a shit on the sidewalk. A city of opposites where the homeless junkie shares the streets with hoodied 20-something CEO of a startup, both probably wearing the same hoodies although most tech companies have a strict policy not to give away company merchandise to people who do not provide any value to the company.

As you walk/read/proceed across the (uncanny) valley in the shadow of meth, you will fear no evil, for Ms.Wiener walks among angels(investors), evangelists, CEOs, CTOs and brogrammers who would rather overdose on protein bars and vitamin D pills. Reading the 2010s version of the tech boom, I realize the Valley has not changed at all from the dotcom boom era of the late 90s-early 2000s that I briefly brushed against. It is still riding the roaring twenties. It will always be the roaring twenties in Silicon Valley. I am older and too tired to keep up. I am glad we got out of that forever young place while we were still nimble to make a break.

Most of Wiener's observations about San Francisco's tech industry elicit a sigh of relief from me. It is similar to the calm feeling you get after committing the premeditated murder of your Facebook account. You no longer have to play catch-up with your 500 'friends' posts and their photos living the high/lie-life. You can live at your own pace, stress-free.The tech-bros in Japanese denim can micro-dose and meditate on their next big disruption or take nootropics and bio-hack their way to being the pioneers of the better world they aim to create. 

But you are free. You are delighted to find that you are still in a world where you can be a wee bit evil and you are not pressured to think different all the time. You are no longer part of the Silicon Valley ecosystem. It could be a different planet for all you care. In case you still want to keep in touch, once in a blue moon, read inter-planetary dispatches like Ms.Wiener's. She does a really good job as an outsider looking in. The outsider who almost became an insider and bowed out before being sucked into the cult of the Valley.

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