One Summer: America 1927

Title: One Summer: America 1927
Author: Bill Bryson
Publisher: Doubleday, 2013 (First)
ISBN: 9780385608282
Pages: 557

This book is a glorified journal entry for the excruciatingly hot summer in the year 1927 which the United States endured. In the five months starting from May to September of that year, the country witnessed some landmark progress in aviation, radio broadcasting and financial prosperity. In addition to this, developments in sports — which means only baseball and boxing in the American context — and sensational news like murders and political assassinations are included. The book summarizes the major events of that summer in a well-researched narrative made richer by a humorous perspective. Looking back a century later, a yawning gulf separates today from that past age. Things we take for granted even in a third world country didn't exist then. Antibiotics still lay a decade in the future. So we read about the President of the USA's 16-year old son developing an infection while playing tennis on the White House grounds. The injury became septic and the boy died a week later. In his autobiography, Calvin Coolidge reflected heartbreakingly that 'when he went, the power and the glory of the Presidency went with him'. Still, there was something romantic about the era as it didn't like practical concerns to get in the way of its musings. Since many of his other books are reviewed here already, Bill Bryson does not need an introduction. Suffice it to say that he is one of my favourite authors.

The 1920s obviously lacked the most common forms of personal entertainment which we now take for granted. There was no mobile phone, no internet, no radio and no TV. That's why people really did gather in enormous numbers for almost any event. The 1920s was the peak decade for reading in American life. Each year, publishers produced 110 million books in more than 10,000 separate titles. The industry was so discreet that it boasted it never published a word that made a maiden blush. Soon, the industry was to be submerged in the flood tide of radio and it soon changed track to accommodate readers' demand for more explicit coverage. Radio picked up very rapidly, reaching every American home. Radio advertising took a large bite off newspaper and magazine ads. Nearly 250 newspapers went under in a decade because of the revenue crunch. Charles Lindbergh's maiden trans-Atlantic flight to Paris was the most famous event in 1927. When he returned triumphantly to the US, it was the day that radio came of age. His arrival was broadcast coast to coast. The ability to sit in one's own living room and listen to a live event in some distant place was as miraculous as teleportation. In spite of all these achievements, crime rate was high. The culprits were not caught in a majority of cases. Where arrests were made, the conviction rate was less than 20 percent.

Bryson observes that the US was staggeringly well-off. American homes shone with sleek appliances and consumer durables that would not become standard in other countries for a generation or more. This was greatly facilitated by the instalment scheme which made its debut along with the consumer revolution. Borrowing became an essential part of life with the invention of the instalment scheme. In the 1920s, America became a high-rise nation. As buildings grew taller, the number of workers pouring into the city centres grew and grew. Unimaginable to us now, but Prohibition was in full force in the US from 1920 to 1933 which mercilessly banned all alcoholic drinks in the country. It shut down the fifth largest industry, turning thousands into bootleggers. In 1927 alone, 11,700 people died from drinking de-natured spirit. The movement started by Wayne Wheeler grew so popular that politicians quickly learned either to support them or to give up any hope of being re-elected. In the 1920s, the share prices kept rising with little correspondence between the prices and the values of the companies they supported. The stock market eventually crashed in 1929, triggering the great depression that traumatized capitalism for a few years.

The central thread in this book is Charles Lindbergh's transatlantic flight and the widespread acclaim it received from an adoring public on both sides of the ocean. Even though the French saw the Americans usually with a low esteem, for a few weeks after Lindbergh's landing, the tide turned on French soil and Americans commanded immense respect. He was feted on a grand scale back home which the introvert Lindbergh found difficult to enjoy and he had an impossible time in that summer. He then embarked on a great aviation tour of America on the same plane on which he flew across the ocean. The tour was very gruelling with 69 overnight stops and 13 'touch' stops. From the moment he left his room in the morning, he was touched and jostled and bothered. Chicken bones and napkins from his dinner plate were fought over in kitchens. Cheques he wrote were rarely encashed; recipients preferred to frame them instead. He had no private life anymore. If he went into a men's room, people followed. Flying between cities was the most restful part of the tour. Bryson pinpoints the real significance of Lindbergh's flight in this book. His tour of America made the country ready for air travel which was unbelievable a year ago. Americans in the 1920s had grown up in a world in which most of the important things happened in Europe. Now suddenly America was dominant in every field such as popular culture, finance and banking, military might, invention and technology.

This book exposes a quirk in American foreign policy. From a different perspective, this can be argued as the basic feature of it as well. The US wanted to send 100 million USD to Austria as food aid after World War I. It was technically an enemy country and American law prevented helping enemies even after war ended. A convenient way around the hurdle was thought up. 45 million USD each was sent to Britain, France and Italy and they obligingly lent the money to Austria on the understanding that it be used to buy American food. This helped American farmers to dispose of surplus food at attractive valuations. But when Austria defaulted on repayment, the US insisted and forced the three intermediaries to pay back. They protested in vain but the US had its way. Transportation was the single sector that grew by leaps and bounds in the period under consideration. But it came with its own set of problems. The railway system was bewilderingly fragmented. One could buy a ticket on any of the 20,000 scheduled services from any of 1085 operating terminals, tracks and ticketing systems. Luxury services in the trains offered a barber, ladies' hairdresser and even a stenographer for taking dictation. The automobile became ubiquitous. Henry Ford revolutionized American car industry by then, but he was an anti-Semite. He accused the Jews of manipulating stock markets, working for the overthrow of Christianity, using Hollywood as a propaganda tool for Jewish interests, promoting jazz music and encouraging the wearing of short skirts. He was greatly admired in Nazi Germany and was the only American mentioned favourably in Mein Kampf. It was said that Hitler kept a framed photo of Ford on his wall. Ford accepted one of Nazi Germany's highest civilian honours — the Grand Cross of the German Eagle.

Even though the US always boasted of personal liberty and an enlightened society, racial discrimination of the coloured people was universal to the point of being institutionalized. When a play in New York showed black and white children playing together as if that were normal, the district attorney for Manhattan sent the police to stop it. This was in the year 1927. Even in the face of severe restrictions, there was a movement of blacks out of the south in the Great Migration. Between 1920 and 1930, 1.3 million southern blacks moved north in the hopes of finding better paying jobs and more personal liberty. Before that period, only 10 percent of blacks lived outside the south. After this era, almost half did. On the other side of the spectrum, the 1920s was also the age of loathing. Bigotry was casual, reflexive and universal. Ku Klux Klan had a resurgence which loathed blacks and Catholics. It had five million members. Eugenics had a large following. In 1927, the US Supreme Court ruled that a woman of low intelligence be sterilized in order to prevent the continuation of her 'imbecile' line. About 60,000 people were sterilized against their will. About 30 states had sterilizing laws and some of them still have those rules in their statute books. 

Baseball is an American game and nowhere outside the US has it any following worth the name. Considering this in mind, readers find the prominent coverage the game gets in the book somewhat tiring and irritating. The biography and playing tenure of George Herman Ruth is a punishment for non-American audience who has no idea of the intricacies of baseball's rules. Similar is the case with boxing. Bryson exhibits fine control of the narrative in a book handling such a large array of diverse topics. The ideas are shuffled regularly but brilliantly made to appear coherent and conforming to the overall plan of the narrative. For example, the chapter on June month links prohibition, World War I, antagonism to German people and a murder victim, all of them referenced in the previous month's chapter as well. The conclusion of the book is admiringly simple, yet evokes a tinge of loss and longing when he condenses the narrative to this line: 'Whatever else it was, it was one hell of a summer.'

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 3 Star

The Shoemaker and His Daughter

Title: The Shoemaker and His Daughter – One Ordinary Family’s Remarkable Journey from Stalin’s Soviet Union to Putin’s Russia
Author: Conor O’Clery
Publisher: Doubleday Ireland, 2018 (First)
ISBN: 9781781620434
Pages: 357

The socialist empire in the Soviet Union threatened capitalism in the post-World War II period when even the US apprehended that the communists might take over most of the globe. But the concern was a bit premature. Margaret Thatcher once famously said, "the problem with socialism is that eventually, you run out of other people's money". It did exactly that in the Soviet Union. Decades of mismanagement and ridiculous economic logic shattered the economy whose coup de grace came in the form of the oil price slump in the early 1980s. Three general secretaries died in quick succession in 3 years and a reformer named Mikhail Gorbachev took the chair. His structural changes got out of hand and ended up in the collapse and dismemberment of the Soviet Union in 1991. It took hardly 6 years to dismantle the communist regimes in eastern Europe. This book follows the life story of a master shoe-designer-cum-maker who weathered the storms of living in a strictly controlled society and still flourished. His daughter studied hard and earned high academic credentials. Incidentally, she is the author's wife and he tells the story of his in-laws in this book which is actually a mirror to the scourge of communism in the Soviet Union and proves that the communist system was founded on lies and monstrous crimes. Conor O'Clery is an Irish journalist and writer. He worked for the Irish Times for 30 years and represented them in many countries including the Soviet Union where he met his wife. He has authored many books.

Stanislav Suvorov was a shoemaker who led a prosperous life in Grozny, Chechnya by making bespoke shoes which were highly prized. He was sent to prison for a charge that was a crime only in a communist polity. The prison term had a devastating effect on the family’s prestige. It migrated to Krasnoyarsk, Siberia to start a new life where too Stanislav led a good life. His wife Marietta hailed from Nagorno-Karabakh which was beset with ethnic tensions between Armenians — to which our family belonged — and neighbouring Azeris. His daughter Zhanna studied diligently and conformed to the norms of a socialist society. She joined the communist party’s youth wing and eventually joined the party itself. She represented a district in the legislative body of Krasnoyarsk. But she still harboured resentment about how her father suffered at the hands of communist officialdom. She married a friend, but gradually drifted apart from him. During her absence from home for her PhD program at Moscow, her husband gets killed in a drunken brawl over an illicit relationship. She meets O’Clery in Moscow as a Russian tutor and the relationship grew. O’Clery was a divorcee with five children but they marry and he adopts her daughter. This occurred during the critical time of USSR’s disintegration. The author and Zhanna relocated to other countries following his transfers to various places and they used to visit her parents occasionally. On the rich tapestry of the family’s story, the author carefully crafts the history of the Soviet Union and how the system affected the life of the family in unexpected ways.

Readers wonder at how inefficient the Soviet system was managed according to the politico-economic theories of communism. With private enterprise curtailed, shops relied on deliveries from central warehouses that were far distant. Provisions were snapped up as soon as they appeared, so it was advantageous to be at the head of the queue or be friendly enough with the manager to buy goods at the back door. A party membership usually helped in such situations. Usually, articles were rare and queues very long that people joined a queue and only later asked what it was for! Scarcity moulded the Soviet people in grotesque ways. The Ukrainian peasant soldiers who invaded Romania which was capitalist in 1944 are reported to have wept when they saw the pretty houses, the fattened cattle and the well-stocked barns. They wept for a way of life and a prosperity that could’ve been theirs if not for communism. The party crushed religion, but even with its suppression, it was rare for an Armenian child who has not been secretly christened, even in communist households. A form of consumer apartheid prevailed. Special shops called Beryozka which stocked food unavailable elsewhere which was open only to holders of hard foreign currency. There were shops reserved for party functionaries that were not accessible to common people. Strict obedience to authority was drilled into the people. People witnessing a state-sponsored unjust act did so in silence, avoiding eye contact with other people. In Stalin’s Russia, no one spoke to strangers about matters that did not concern them.

Communism shunned any kind of enterprise — however small — coming from the people who were meant only to toil hard as per the commands of authority figures. It was essential that they should not think for themselves, or more practicably, not have time to think. As a result, private enterprise was not only discouraged, but penalized too. After seven decades of this madness, party bosses wondered why their economy was in shambles. Even the modest shoe and boot business of Stanislav (the author's father-in-law) was forced to run low-key because it thwarted the state's aspiration to own and control all the means of production. He restricted services to only the customers he knew. He was detained one day for selling his used car at a higher rate than the approved one which amounted to speculation that was a punishable offence. Article 154 of the criminal code made punishable any act such as 'buying up and reselling of goods or any other articles for the purpose of making a profit'. Punishments were very harsh. Stanislav was arrested and sentenced to seven years in jail. His new car was confiscated and re-assigned to a party functionary. The judiciary was subject to directives from the Kremlin on penal policy. Judges served 5-year terms and their continued careers depended on the party's assessment of their conformity.

Not content with nipping private initiative in the bud, communism sought to wipe out individuality as well, encouraging conformity to a goal set from on high. All kinds of creative literature wilted as a result. Central planning did not allow for individual architectural expression whose spin off was the almost identical cities and towns across the country. All residential blocks looked the same. Each city had its statue of Lenin and streets named after Lenin and Marx. The shops were all the same, carrying numbers rather than names. Dissimulation was the norm when portraying 'achievements' of the Soviet system to outsiders and quite ironically, to its own citizens as well. In speeches cataloguing the milestones, the word 'and' was never put before the last item so as to give the impression that the list can go on and on. Legislature was a total mockery of that democratic function. The role of deputies in legislative forums was to endorse the decisions of the hierarchy. As a rule, discussion was minimal and endorsements unanimous. Every time a vote was required, a voice called out, "those for" and all hands went up; 'Those against', no reaction; 'Those abstaining', no reaction; 'Motion passed' and the exercise ended. Foreign travel was a state-controlled privilege and only certain categories of citizens with proven party loyalty were allowed. The state didn't even allow people to talk to international contacts and telephone calls could be made only through an operator. Direct international dialling was introduced in Moscow for the Olympics in 1980 for the convenience of foreign athletes, but was discontinued immediately afterwards. The academia was constantly reminded of their place in the socialist system. Even in the 1980s, students and faculty of academic institutions were forced to help with the harvesting on state farms. They would toil on distant stretches of muddy fields with no facilities and primitive sleeping arrangements.

The interval in which communism crumbled was miraculously short as to be unbelievable. The fleeting nature of its collapse was telling on the flimsy foundations and the rot to the core. Brezhnev managed a consumer spending boom due to the high price of oil which brought in hard currency. Gorbachev introduced glasnost (openness) and perestroika (reconstruction). He granted Soviet writers unprecedented freedom because he wanted the Intelligentsia on his side to discomfit the hard-line conservatives who were obstructing his reforms. Reassessment of historical figures, past events and revelations became ever more frank. This openness was genuinely believed to be capable of reforming the party and the existing system. Even in 1989, the party believed that perestroika was designed to fully use the potential of socialism and that only with a renewed and revitalized party in the vanguard can the Soviet Union move to a renewal of socialism and a bright future. Unfortunately for the party, Gorbachev was unlucky. It was his misfortune that oil prices had fallen but consumer expectation couldn't be lowered. He allowed constituent republics to get in touch with foreign partners and thereby unknowingly pushed them on the road to independence. With Khrushchev's thaw and Brezhnev's consumer society, people became less afraid to speak openly than the previous generation which had a memory of Stalin's arbitrary and cruel punishments for even a hint of dissidence.

O'Clery makes an analysis of the Soviet system's transformation to a market economy for which it suffered enormously. As Solshenitsyn said, 'whatever the communists told about their socialist system was false, but unfortunately, whatever they told about the capitalist system turned out to be true'. Hyper-inflation which followed the fall of the Soviet Union wiped out entire life's savings, turning millions of Russians into paupers. It was a humiliation for the generation that defeated Hitler to learn that war widows were getting Red Cross parcels from Germany. Russia entered the modern consumer era in the 1990s, with everything available in the stores, but it became a dangerous place with increased crime, financial chaos and no respite for the poor while a few powerful Russians syphoned off national wealth and the former captains of communism transformed themselves into oligarchs of capitalism. The book also provides an overview of the Russian society. Family ties were intense and close, which almost feels like India, in the importance it accorded to the extended family. Fathers were typically not appreciative of their daughters' boyfriends and we read about Zhanna's father breaking the finger bone of one when he gives the poor lad a 'firm' handshake after he caught them kissing! Parents offered financial help to their children to buy homes and donated furniture. Whatever the Soviet society lacked in some material comforts, they compensated for it in intangible things. Zhanna was accustomed to the discipline and respect shown to teachers in Soviet schools and she was taken aback to find her American pupils taking chewing gum in class and putting their feet up on the desks.

The book shares chilling details of how Islamic fundamentalism took hold in Chechnya once the central hold weakened that eventually made the non-Muslims flee from the province. It's true that Russia established itself there by resorting to brutal policies and stubborn suppression, but it does not justify the Chechen attempt to establish an exclusive religious state. When the author and wife visited Grozny in 1991, the Russians were living in fear that 'if incited, hitherto peaceful Muslim neighbours might turn against them overnight' (p. 279). Street graffiti threatening Russians came up quickly which warned them with dire messages such as 'RUSSIANS DON'T LEAVE — WE WANT SLAVES' and 'DON'T BUY THE APARTMENT FROM MISHA (meaning any Russian) — HE WILL BE GONE SOON ANYWAY'. This looks exactly similar to what the Kashmiri Pandits underwent in Kashmir at around the same time. The script was the same and universal with slight, local variations. Non-Russians were not exempt as seen in another slogan: 'RUSSIANS BACK TO RYZAN, ARMENIANS TO YEREVAN'. This exposed the true colour of the Chechen pogrom that it was not against Russians alone, but against all Christians. The book is structured in an engaging way where two stories unfold at the same time — that of the Suvorov family and that of Soviet Union itself. The writing style produces an intimacy to the characters among the readers. Family photographs are interspersed throughout the narrative. The story is presented in a charming present tense that appear contemporaneous to readers and attracts tremendous interest.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star

She Has Her Mother’s Laugh

Title: She Has Her Mother’s Laugh – The Powers, Perversions and Potential of Heredity
Author: Carl Zimmer
Publisher: Picador, 2018 (First)
ISBN: 9781509818549
Pages: 656

Heredity is a powerful tool with which life sustains and propagates itself on earth. Even though its effects were clear to every society, the methods by which it is transferred across generations came to light only in the twentieth century. With the discovery of genes and unwinding the mysteries of DNA, mankind basked in the tremendous potential the knowledge offered to enhance the wellbeing of people – and, by corollary, causing unforeseen consequences if the technology was not responsibly handled. Genes are the blessing and the curse that our ancestors bestowed on us. However, science identified many other factors that are equally crucial to the development of humans as genes. This book covers all these channels in excellent detail and provides a comprehensive view of genetic research. The single most important idea it gives off is that inheritance is a broad concept which propagates through DNA (what is usually called nature), environment (nurture), epigenetic (transfer of some acquired traits) and by teaching the young (culture). Even though these are quite diverse, a little consideration would show that the benefits it conveys to a living being are broadly of the same nature. Carl Zimmer is an American popular science writer, blogger, columnist, and journalist who specializes in the topics of evolution, parasites and heredity. He has authored many books.

The book provides a good overview of the study of heredity beginning from Charles V, the Habsburg emperor, to plant and animal breeding in subsequent centuries. Generations of interbreeding in the royal line resulted in specific genetic features such as a deformed jaw (later called the Habsburg Jaw) among the princes. Their overall health was very fragile too. Things got moving when Darwin appeared on the scene. ‘Origin of Species’ was one of the most influential books ever written. Darwin could not explain the biology behind why individuals varied and how traits are copied to the next generation. He believed that a trait acquired in life could be passed down to future generations. We read about Gregor Mendel and the birth of the concept of genes. Hugo de Vries discovered in the year Darwin died that every cell contained invisible particles that are responsible for passing traits from one generation to the next. He called them pangenes which was later shortened to genes.

When it was established that traits could be transferred to another generation, racism suggested the possibility that the white race was at the pinnacle of human evolution. Even among the whites, the Nordic stock was deemed to be superior. Whites suffering from genetic diseases ranked further lower in the hierarchy with blacks and coloured people going down to the bottom rung. A new branch of study called eugenics thought of ways to cleanse and thereby better the human stock. By the dawn of the twentieth century in the US, eugenicists wanted to improve the human stock by selective breeding and preventing people with genetic disabilities from having children. Across the ocean in Germany, it was copied by Nazis into a devilish strategy. It first targeted people with disorders (usually poor intellectual capacity) to be sterilized. Hitler established a set of racial hygiene laws. In the first year after establishing hereditary health courts, Germany sterilized 64,000 people and by 1944, the tally went up to 400,000 including the mentally ill, the deaf, gypsies and Jews. In 1939, Nazis started killing off people with hereditary disabilities. It is estimated that they eliminated 200,000 lives. In the US, the craze for eugenics sailed in the inverse ratio as its progress in Germany. American objectors of eugenics repudiated it as bad science and bad policy. The Eugenics Record Office was shut down in 1939. Eugenics is down for the moment, but it may spring back to life if a powerful backer comes to its rescue. How many of you did think of Donald Trump while reading these lines?

Zimmer gets into the question of whether a characteristic is heritable in the true sense of the term, that is, whether an organism will definitely suffer the consequences if a specific gene is present or missing in its genome. The gist of the discussion is that the linkage is too complicated to decide beyond doubt. Colour of eyes is a heritable trait. Citing the example of a genetic disease called PKU, the author argues that it showed a way to attack the idea that our intelligence is fixed by the genes. This is an unfortunate example for the argument however. The brains of these people get stunted and they end up with very low intelligence like a toddler. This is because the gene prevents the dissociation of the amino acid phenylalanine obtained from food which eventually reaches the brain and damages the nerve cells. If no treatment is made, it will lead to devastating intellectual disability. But if the infant is given a diet low in that chemical, the symptoms disappear. What this example proves is that genes are extremely important but in some cases, some alleviating measures can be found. This does not support the author’s logic that genes are not that critical. Then he takes up the case of height as a heritable trait. Here, the dependence on genes is as high as 86 per cent, but it is strongly linked to nutrition also. After each generation, the world is getting taller, not just in the developed countries. South Korean women grew eight inches taller in average height in a century, while Iranian men got taller by six and a half inches. The book then concludes that intelligence depends on several physical factors and genes that no direct relationship can be drawn. Studies held in Scotland suggest that lower intelligence test scores raised people’s risk of death. It’s possible that people who score higher may be better able to understand information their doctors give them. Genes still account for only a small percentage of the variation in people’s test scores. As with height, it has not been able to definitely prove which genes cause the effect to occur.

Race or racial purity is a concept which is associated with the genome of people constituting a society. Zimmer makes an extraordinary effort to conclude that race is not supported by DNA. He observes that the concept of race is not a feature of the natural world beyond our social experience. But this looks uncannily similar to the wokeish canard that gender is a social construct rather than biological. Hence, take it with a pinch of salt! Up until the middle ages, writers never used the word in the present meaning. Racial laws were common in the US as recently as half a century ago. The Racial Integrity Act passed in 1924 barred interracial marriages. It defined the white people as those whose blood is entirely white (of course, not in colour) having no known, demonstrable or ascertainable admixture of the blood of another race. This law would stand till 1967 when a couple’s wedding was annulled on its basis. They appealed to the Supreme Court which struck down the law. The author argues that if races were biologically significant, most of the genetic diversity should exist between races rather than between individuals of the same race. In the 1950s, Richard Lewontin made a study of a wide range of human populations which found that genetic differences between races was only 6.3 per cent, whereas the diversity within populations was 85.4 per cent. Even with this data, it somehow feels that something important and which can tip the scales has not been told. Since the subject is contentious, it is understandable that authors would prefer to bet on the side of the politically correct option. There is a brief analysis on contagious cancer, which was a scientific secret hiding in plain sight for two centuries. Eight cases were identified so far and they would not be the last. In the case of humans, the documented cases show a single leap (from one person to another and not more). It may be that our immune systems are so strong that cancers never get the chance to evolve into parasites that can leap from host to host.

The birth of a living being is something which is looked at with awe and wonder even by committed rationalists. This book furnishes a good discussion on how cell division takes place when a foetus is developed, clearly articulating the intricacies of the process and the pure amazement at one cell replicating to hundreds of types of totally different cells in different parts of the body. There is a startling narrative on human chimeras where the genome and proteins contain traces of another person, usually a twin, whose genetic particles get mixed up in utero. If two embryos of the same sex are involved, it’s much easier for them to go unnoticed. In the other cases, the blood of the person may carry cells of a different blood type. A case is listed where a person possessed male and female sexual organs. In the case of animals, an example is described where it carried the genetic imprint of two fathers. Obviously, this possibility is not examined for human cases. We also read about unusual instances of a mother’s DNA not matching her children. This happens when the mother was a tetragametic chimera (where one embryo develops into a person combining that of a should-have-been-twin). It is now known that foetuses can pass cells to mothers and vice versa, whose effects can last for several years after birth. Women who had given birth to boys carried cells with Y chromosomes. This book pushes the envelope of genetic research to the end of the 2010s. It looks like a whiff of Lamarckism is returning to science under the lofty title of ‘transgenerational epigenetic inheritance’.

The author unveils a chapter in the life of the famous writer Pearl S. Buck who is the author of the masterpiece The Good Earth. It was one of the four books with which I started my reading career. In fact, I’m not sure how many times I have read this superb novel. It was news to me that Buck started writing fiction just to save enough money to settle her mentally stunted daughter in a good institution. The child was suffering from PKU. There is a good discussion on gene therapies on somatic and germ lines such as CRISPR and mitochondrial, fully exposing the ethical and scientific concerns associated with them. The apprehension that this may lead to a new kind of eugenics is also very strong. In vitro gametogenesis offers the dizzying possibility of transforming on ordinary skin cell into a sperm or egg from which a baby can take shape. The author displays an unnecessary wokeish bias in the last chapter in accusing the whites of inheriting wealth way more than the blacks and suggests that this may be legally stopped. In a second case, he suggests that instead of using for disease eradication, CRISPR should be employed for saving endangered species, but he does not consider who would fund such research. This is also a wrong appreciation of the priorities.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star

Nexus

Title: Nexus – A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI
Author: Yuval Noah Harari
Publisher: Fern Press, 2024 (First)
ISBN: 9781911717096
Pages: 492

‘Sapiens’ was a best seller by Yuval Noah Harari that showcased some very pertinent ideas on the evolution of human societies from an anthropological perspective. The take-home message from the book was that the immense success of human societies was not caused by the exceptional intelligence of individuals, but due to the cooperative effort by a multitude of individuals. For a group of people to cooperate as part of an organisation, some methods are essential to bring them together and that title examined them in good detail. This book is an extension of the idea which evaluates the information networks which bind humans together. Mankind gains enormous power by building large networks of cooperation, but the way these networks are built predisposes us to use that power unwisely. Our problem then is a network problem. Humanity possesses many powers which they can’t effectively control. The tendency to create powerful things with unintended consequences started not with the invention of machines or AI, but with the invention of religion. Prophets and theologians have summoned powerful spirits that ended up with flooding the world with blood instead of love and joy. With this stark reminder delivered beforehand, the book inspects information networks from the stone age to artificial intelligence (AI). The goal of the book is to provide a more accurate historical perspective on the AI revolution, because AI is the first ever technology that is capable of making decisions and generating ideas by itself. My earlier reviews of Sapiens and Homo Deus (also by Harari) can be accessed by clicking on the book titles.

Harari delves deep into the definition of information to get the discussion going. The naïve view among people is that information is an attempt to create reality. He argues that reality may not be the basis of people associating together. There’s something called inter-subjective reality which is true only for the people believing in the same story or myth. In this light, information actually creates realities by tying together disparate things, like people or empires, into a network or nexus. In short, the role of information is to connect people together to create order in a network rather than representing truth or reality. As we look at the history of information over the ages, we see a constant rise in connectivity without a concomitant rise in truthfulness or wisdom. To reinforce the point, Harari presents an example on the nature of reality taken from an episode in the creation of Israel which runs counter to the truth perceived by a Palestinian. Considering his Jewish background and Palestinian backers usually having a short fuse, this attempt is rather bold.

The author focusses his attention to provide an interesting and informative view of the information technologies that made human societies stick together. The ‘story’ is the first information technology mankind developed to connect people. It was assumed wrongly that people connect to the person (hero or heroine) of the story, but in fact they connect to the story told about that person. For uniting people, fiction offered many advantages over truth because it could be made really simple and understood by everybody while the latter was often complicated. Plato, in his Republic, imagined that the constitution of his utopian state would be based on ‘noble lie’. While stories circulated in societies, it was realized that poems and myths could be easily remembered by people but other factors were also needed to run a society such as tax records or payable amounts that required a unique non-organic information technology to function. This led to the origin of the written document. Retrieval of the document at the right time was a problem that was solved by the creation of bureaucracy. This led to the development of more powerful information networks. The written book became part of the network in first millennium BCE. After eons in which gods spoke to men via shamans, priests, prophets, oracles and other human messengers, god began to speak through the information technology of the infallible book. Inevitably, the holy book spawned numerous interpretations which eventually turned out to be far more consequential than the book itself. Problems of interpretation tilted the balance of power between the holy book and the institution called church in favour of the latter. Here, the term church is used in a universal sense and not restricted to the Christian variety. The power to interpret the sacred teachings made these institutions omnipotent. The Catholic church interpreted Jesus’ gentle words in a way that allowed it to become the richest landowner in Europe, to launch violent crusades and to establish murderous inquisitions (p.89).

When we come to the modern age, we see mass communication technologies that helped democracy become technically feasible. Newspapers and printing caused consolidation of public opinion that is a precondition of democracy. Hence the new information technology of the late modern era gave rise to both large scale democracy and large scale totalitarianism. We generally tend to be unaware of the potency of the latter. Stalinism (which is the author’s euphemism for communism; for some unknown reason he does not want to call a spade a spade) came close to world domination after World War II and it would be naïve to think that its disregard for truth doomed it to failure or that its ultimate collapse guarantees that such a system can never again rise. The advent of the computer age was again a game changer. The main split in twenty-first century politics might not be between democracies and totalitarian regimes; instead the participants might be human beings and non-human agents such as AI. For thousands of years, prophets, poets and politicians used language to manipulate and reshape society. Now computers are learning how to do it. As computers amass power, new information networks will emerge, but for at least some time, most of the old information chains will remain. Harari suggests ‘alien intelligence’ as the expansion of AI. The book looks at the ways in which an authoritarian system can bend the social media to serve its need of subservience of the people to it such as China’s social credit system. Apart from money, there was traditionally a non-monetary system that was variously known as honour, reputation or status. The new social credit system ascribes to award precise values even for social gestures such as smiles or visiting parents! For example, you might get ten points for picking up litter from the street or lose fifteen points for disturbing neighbours with loud music. This may wipe off privacy and turn life into a ‘never-ending job interview’. This will also pave the way for a totalitarian control system.

The latter half of the narrative is a laboriously long and uninspiring sermon on the likely pitfalls of AI technology when it spreads to the entire world and begins to handle all aspects of human life. The possibility of such systems taking over the world and turning humanity into its slaves is not seriously considered. Instead, the very real chance of AI acquiring the prejudices of human societies such as racism or misogyny is dissected threadbare. In view of this threat, the author recommends to build human institutions that will be able to check not just familiar human weaknesses but also radically alien errors. The scope of AI systems is also evaluated in the book. Some of mankind’s intellectual tasks can easily be automated such as playing chess or providing medical diagnosis, but manual tasks such as dishwashing or nursing are not so easily amenable to AI. People who want a job in 2050 should perhaps invest in their motor and social skills, as much as in their intellect. Data colonialism is a threat Harari flags prominently. American AI systems engage in mass surveillance of Pakistan’s mobile phone network and then uses a machine-learned algorithm to identify suspected terrorists (p.236). This would lead to the pioneer nations or corporations in AI to the ability to control data using their advantages to achieve domination over other nations or corporates. Mastery of AI and data give these empires the power to control people’s lives beyond their national borders. Raw data will be harvested throughout the world and will flow to the imperial hub. There the cutting edge technology will be developed, producing unbeatable algorithms. These will then be exported back to data colonies but neither the profits nor the power is distributed back. Overall coverage of the topic leads readers to the impression that the author is unduly pessimistic.

As noted above, the long lecture on democracy and dictatorship is rudimentary and plain to the point of being redundant. Democratic societies need not be lectured to on the requirement of democracy while totalitarian societies will not be allowed to listen to the author’s tiresome tongue-lashing. The author appreciates the present Indian government under Narendra Modi for its clean up mission. He casts his glance on the Clean India Mission (Swachh Bharat) and the $10 billion spent to build 100 million latrines and remarks that ‘sewage isn’t the stuff of epic poems, but it’s a test of a well-functioning state’ (p.56). The book exhibits scathing and sometimes out-of-place criticism of Vladimir Putin with comments such as ‘Anticipating present-day strongmen like Putin, Augustus [Caesar] didn’t crown himself king, and pretended that Rome was still a republic’ (p.140). While loquacious on Russia, Harari is uncannily tight-lipped on China or its pathetic credentials on democracy and human rights, seeming reluctant to utter anything that would antagonize the Chinese Communist party. Left liberalism seeps through every page, paragraph and word in the book that makes it so drab, unlike Harari’s earlier works. He laments about government censors cutting out free speech, but wants social media platforms to employ more censors – human or AI-based – to block out rightist speech which he conveniently classifies as hate speech. It’s a peculiarity of this genre of scholars to demand total freedom to say anything for themselves while wishing to drown out any opinion dissenting with them. It’s a liberal principle that gender preferences be left to the individual to handle. There is no need for homosexuals to shout their sexual preferences from the rooftops. Being a gay himself, the author has no right to force the readers to irrelevantly go through the problems they face in modern societies and to ‘wonder’ at how he met ‘his husband’ in an LGBTQ social media platform in 2002. Being non-compliant to society’s norms don’t make you entitled to utter something which is best left unsaid. The latter half of the book on AI is mere gaslighting of the readers under the guise of examining potential problems of the new technology.

The book is recommended.

Rating: 2 Star

Dutch Heritage in Fort Cochin, Cannanore and Quilon

Title: Dutch Heritage in Fort Cochin, Cannanore and Quilon
Author: Bauke van Der Pol
Publisher: Darpan, 2024 (First)
ISBN: 9788119355303
Pages: 138

In the colonial race for India, the British and the Dutch joined the fray at around the same time, but the latter opted out of the race two centuries later, influenced by historical movements in Europe and a splash of red in the account books. The Dutch were not able to penetrate into the interior and remained stuck in coastal streaks where they fought the British and local princes with their backs always to the sea. The Dutch had a mission to perform in Kerala in the final reckoning. They drove out the Portuguese who alienated the locals with their characteristic religious intolerance. Kochi (Cochin), Kannur (Cannanore) and Kollam (Quilon) were the three places where the Dutch had a solid presence and this book investigates their legacy at these places. Even though the place names have been indigenised a few decades back, the book still uses the colonial names throughout in the text. Bauke van Der Pol is an anthropologist and an Indo-Dutch historian. He has written about and travelled throughout India and lectured on the historical relations between the two countries. He first visited India in 1974 at the age of 22 and has interacted with backward communities in India. He has written many books on the Dutch presence and their influence in India.

Van Der Pol begins with a survey of how the Dutch ended up in India. The company known as VoC (Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie – United East India Company) was one of the first multinationals in the world and was a contemporary of the British East India Company, set up for the same purpose. Dutch history in India covers about 150 years of activity and is often mistaken for the Portuguese or the British. Being a coastal region with a rich history of trade in spices, Kerala was a major theatre of operations for the Dutch. Cochin, Cannanore and Quilon were the best kept Dutch forts in India. The Dutch conquered the Portuguese possessions in Kerala in 1663 and held sway for nearly a century. Their defeat at the hands of Marthanda Varma at Kolachel in 1741 inaugurated the beginning of the end. They were finally replaced by the British in 1795. The first agreement the VoC had struck in India was in 1604 with the Zamorin of Calicut vowing to fight their common enemy – the Portuguese. There began a colonial enterprise that was uprooted in 1795 when following Napoleon’s occupation of the Netherlands, the British took over their possessions in India. In 1825, the Treaty of London was signed and the last VoC stronghold of Chinsurah in Bengal was handed over to the British. The downfall of VoC was caused by defective bookkeeping in the Netherlands, mismanagement and corruption in Asia, growing costs of overseas administration and the Fourth English War of 1780-84. Many parts of the book are based on the letters sent home by the missionary Canter Visscher between 1717 and 1724.

Fort Cochin was the head of Dutch operations in India. The town has a variegated history. The Portuguese owned Fort Cochin from 1498 to 1663, the Dutch till 1795 and the British thereafter till India’s independence in 1947. The author remarks that what is remaining of the Dutch heritage can still be reasonably found because a lot of drawings, maps and paintings of Fort Cochin are still available in Dutch museums and archives. A striking thing to note in this context is the early colonialists’ eager initiative to re-plant the city of Amsterdam in Kerala as many street names in Fort Cochin are also found in the parent Dutch city. However, the architectural style did not seem to differ that much between the Dutch and the Portuguese. Even though he arrived almost half a century after the latter was driven out of Fort Cochin, Canter Visscher observes in 1720 that it was not always clear which houses were Portuguese or Dutch. Van Der Pol walks around Fort Cochin, visits still extant houses of the era, describes its architectural details and marvels at the still-preserved sale deeds of these properties. In addition to the old town, the author visits heritage places nearby, such as the forts at Cranganore (Kodungallur) and Chettuva. The author also comments appreciably on the slightly more tolerant form of the religion followed by the Dutch. He says that unlike the Portuguese, the Dutch chaplains did not actively convert people into Protestantism. The Catholics were forced to remove their religious idols and altarpieces to churches outside Fort Cochin after the Dutch conquest in 1663.

The book casts a glance at the innards of the society back when Dutch power was in the ascendant who rather uncharacteristically encouraged the Jewish community in Cochin to flourish by trade. It makes an analysis of the Jewish settlement and some of the persons in that community who were connected to the Dutch as confidants and middlemen in trade with locals. It was only after the arrival of the Dutch in 1663 that they developed contacts with foreign Jewish communities which ended their isolation. The author still finds some remnants of anti-Semitism and racial intolerance among the Dutch settlers. In a sale deed of 1772 of a prime real estate inside the fort, it was mentioned that the plot shall not be sold to Jews, Moors (Muslims) or heathen (Hindus), in which case the company has to approve the transaction (p.47). The population of Fort Cochin was around 2,000 by the end of the Dutch era, of which 20 per cent were slaves. Some form of discrimination based on skin colour was also rampant among the Jews as well who were split into two distinct groups such as the black and Pardesi (foreign – white) Jews. Exemplifying the marriage of two senior individuals named Gumliel Salem and Reema which had to be solemnized in a Mumbai synagogue, the author brings to light the blatant refusal of the local Pardesi synagogue to carry out the rituals because Gumliel was black. When the couple eventually returned to the Pardesi synagogue, all the women in the ladies’ gallery walked out in protest!

The author follows the same itinerary at Cannanore and Quilon as at Fort Cochin though on a reduced scale because of the scantiness of architectural evidence. He provides an interesting aside from the temple at Mavelikkara that exhibits the close association the Dutch had established with the Travancore royal family in the eighteenth century. After the battle at Kolachel, Marthanda Varma entered into a treaty with the Dutch at Mavelikkara. There is a tiered lamp in the temple at the foot of which the replicas of four VoC soldiers cast in bronze stand guard at each corner of the lamp. The soldiers in characteristic Dutch hats stand with the head humbly downwards and in their hands a gun rests on the ground with the barrel upwards, symbolizing peace. The lamp is thought to have been donated by the Dutch. Unlike the Portuguese, the Dutch had a hand in promoting knowledge about Kerala’s flora to a wide audience in Europe by commissioning a botanical compendium named Hortus Indicus Malabaricus, under the pioneering effort of Henrik van Reede, the governor. This book offers tribute to him and the native experts who took part in the endeavour. However, among the VoC personnel, van Reede was known as a maverick. His rivals complained to Dutch higher authorities that he ‘writes elaborate letters about the local plants and trees but did not know how to make Malabar profitable’. As an anthropologist, the author has close connections to the depressed classes of Kerala. He visited Cheruvathur in 1983 to live among the Pulaya caste to see how their social conditions were improved over the years and was quite impressed at the steady progress the community has made.

The book is published in hard cover format with fine, thick pages so as to feel like a collector’s item. The photographs are in colour and the paper is partially glossy making it a coffee-table book. The author notes that the roles of Indians and the Dutch have been reversed over the centuries because now the Indians are visiting the Netherlands to look for trade items. Readers can make an amusing observation regarding the racial profile of Kerala through two unrelated photographs in the book. On page 71, there is a photograph of a group of Jews who left for Israel in 1955. On page 108, a group photo of the community with whom the author stayed for some time and who belong to the Pulaya caste which was traditionally considered very backward. The curious part is that you really can’t tell the two images apart without a closer look on the attire which signify that all castes and religions in Kerala comprise of people belong to one and the same racial stock. It is worthwhile for architectural lovers to explore Fort Cochin with this book in hand as the trek would impart a lot of insight into the closely woven fabric of Indo-Dutch ties.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star

A Cabinet Secretary Looks Back

Title: A Cabinet Secretary Looks Back – From Poona to the Prime Minister’s Office
Author: B. G. Deshmukh
Publisher: HarperCollins India, 2004 (First)
ISBN: 9788172234744
Pages: 392

Bhalchandra Gopal Deshmukh was a 1951-batch IAS officer from Maharashtra who had served in his home state and Gujarat in the junior cadres and got promoted as Chief Secretary of Maharashtra. In the meantime, he was intermittently deputed to central government where he took up various assignments. He was posted as Cabinet Secretary in 1986 and appointed as Principal Secretary to the Prime Minister in 1989. He served three prime ministers in his career – Rajiv Gandhi and those who followed him, such as V P Singh and Chandrashekhar – until he retired from service in 1990. Deshmukh has written several books on his tenure in the government and this book is one of them. The parts which attract the readers’ attention is from his assuming the post of Cabinet Secretary. The period 1986-90 was noted for tremendous political upheavals in India and abroad, such as the Bofors scandal, Ram Janmabhumi issue, insurrection in Sri Lanka, heightened militancy in Punjab and the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe. The book presents a closer picture on some of these issues but unfortunately, it does not further clarify any of them.

Deshmukh declares at the outset that it is not his intention or objective to expose any sensational facts or to expose skeletons in the cupboard. If you get discouraged at this and decide not to read any further, you’ll not be much mistaken. The narrative is so lacklustre and neutered. His only aim is to motivate the young generation to join the civil service because the experience is ‘fascinating and self-satisfying’. The author seems to be a status-quo man with not much innovative ideas to transform or improve. He openly confesses that ‘it is impossible to remove corruption but people are happy if it is controlled and reduced’ (p.135). However, the book uncovers the pettiness of a few personalities, the most notable being V K Krishna Menon, who was the defence minister in Nehru’s cabinet. Our author was due for promotion as deputy secretary and his name was sent to the defence ministry of which Menon was the head. At that time, he was pissed with the finance minister C D Deshmukh who had raked up the jeep corruption scandal against Menon. He stoutly refused to accept the author declaring ‘I don’t want a Deshmukh in my ministry’ (p.52), referring to his namesake who was Menon’s bete noire. There are glimpses of the miserable license raj in the book which was introduced by Nehru and Indira and was stifling India’s industrial growth. We read about a chief minister finalizing the list of who should get cars. Remember that all of them had paid the full price out of their pockets but could not get delivery of the vehicle because the government was determining the number of vehicles to be produced in a given month. There were restrictions on private industrialists to set up plants with their own money. Government sometimes refused to grant licenses, according to the claims of their competitors on the plea that they’d lose market share if the new plant came through! Altogether, the system was planned to work in a way as to maximise corruption. 

Having served in the highest echelons of Indian bureaucracy including the home department, the hollowness and obvious duplicity in his assessment of the communal situation in some trouble spots in North India are to be attributed to political correctness rather than naivety. He believes economic parameters to be the cause of communal unrest in Moradabad and Aligarh. He says that Muslim workers did not earn fair wages while Hindu financiers and traders reaped the real profits. See the deceitful comparison? He does not say whether Hindu workers earned fair wages or Muslim financiers reaped profits. All this sophistry is to avoid pointing out the real cause of communal clashes – fanaticism. Further, he opines that Muslim youth were not properly educated and faced unemployment which led them to antisocial activities that ultimately turned into communal trouble (p.106). He does not stop to think for a moment whether it was one of the causes that drove Muslims into a sordid orgy of violence in 1985 following the Supreme Court’s verdict forcing a little-known man named Mohammed Ahmed Khan to pay alimony to his divorced ex-wife Shah Bano Begum. That’s why readers reach the conclusion that duplicity and selective amnesia are prerequisites to secularism of the Indian variety. Quite naturally, Deshmukh justifies the 1975-77 Emergency with the remark that ‘if some progress had to be made, gentle force is required to enforce discipline among staff and make citizens accept their responsibility’ (p.84). He has a very low opinion of the military top brass, especially General Sundarji who is accused of canvassing for the post of field marshal for himself. Exposing an unrealistic and fanciful mindset, the author advocates for a cut in defence spending through effective foreign policy which can develop friendship with our enemies that would substitute for the shortage of funds to buy arms (p.167). This is a strange comment from a Cabinet Secretary and it is fortunate that the government was sane enough to consign this idea to the dustbin. There is a section in the book that exposes the blatant intervention the executive made on the prerogative of the Election Commission of India. Rajiv Gandhi decided in October 1989 that national elections should be held on 22nd, 24th and 26th of the following month. The author himself conveyed this information to Peri Shastri, the election commissioner, who was very agitated at first at this shameless appropriation of the Commission’s authority, but later fell in line (p.213).

The author had a close official relationship with Rajiv Gandhi and he closely watched how Indira Gandhi functioned as the prime minister. As a result, this book provides some shocking revelations about the administrative tenures of the mother-son duo. Indira handled her state chief ministers like puppets. Vasant Rao Naik in Maharashtra was asked to step down after she promoted his rivals in the party to create trouble. The reason for this disgraceful act was that he was getting popular with good agricultural reforms. Naik resigned in February 1975. Under Indira’s tenure, corruption became more rampant and refined. The system of the party claiming a good cut in all major contracts, especially with foreign supplies, was well established (p.174). This was claimed to be proved in the HDW submarine case where the German company paid 10 per cent commission to Indian agents in buying submarines for the Indian navy. The author was informed that Indira was very annoyed with the agent as he did not pass on the promised amount from the commission to the Congress party and she refused to meet him on her next visit to the UK (p.203). This leads him to lament that ‘as cabinet secretary, I was aware of the widespread corruption in the central bureaucracy, but I could not do much in the atmosphere then prevailing when political corruption was overwhelming’ (p.153). Rajiv Gandhi had far more integrity in this regard, but he faltered in other areas. Rajiv’s inexperience and immaturity in administration and political matters created acute problems. He reshuffled the council of ministers 22 times in a space of 39 months and there was a virtual merry-go-round in some of the ministries. He was more inclined towards suave advisors and officials who came from public schools, could speak and write good English and had a gloss both in appearance and presentation. He was impressed with short-term results and impatient when an officer tried to explain a long-term strategy that was bound to be slower. There was another face of Rajiv than the gentle and calm one he wished to project. He had little respect for some opposition chief ministers such as NTR, Karunanidhi and Devilal and used to fight with them in NDC meetings. He did not show necessary respect and consideration in parliamentary proceedings. He was unwilling to attend parliamentary sessions unless absolutely necessary (p.175).

In the final section of the book, Deshmukh reminisces about his time with V. P. Singh and Chandrashekhar as the principal secretary to the prime minister. Regarding Singh, he observes that he implemented Mandal Commission recommendations to split Hindu votes and crush the BJP whose support he loathed to accept and with whom he did not share a public platform in the election campaign. This same frame of mind regarding assuming power at any cost afflicted Chandrashekhar too. His overarching ambition to become the prime minister made him cast away his scruples and morality and take the help of Rajiv Gandhi whom he heartily disliked, if not detested. As a private person, he was a gem of a man, but his ambition turned him into a typical Indian politician. The author also handled the Kashmir issue and bemoans the pathetic situation created by Article 370 of the Indian Constitution – which conferred special rights to Jammu and Kashmir – without identifying the root cause which was the article itself that was finally scrapped in 2019. He notes that refugees from Pakistan who arrived in Kashmir during Partition could not be granted citizenship due to the special status of the state and displays impotent rage at the government’s helplessness!

The author led a clean career without any adverse reflection or irregularity. In fact, he boasts about this in a contented way that the only conviction he faced was for a traffic violation of sounding the horn in an area where it was banned. The book contains an account of what the author knows about the Bofors scam and concludes that neither Rajiv Gandhi nor any member of his family received any portion of the kickbacks. There are no private or personal anecdotes in the book. His marital status would have remained an enigma had a photo of the author and his wife with the chief minister’s family been not included. There are separate chapters on Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Jammu and Kashmir and Punjab. Reading the dull passages, readers feel that the author never took up any challenging job, always bowing to senior bureaucrats or politicians and feeling contented for even minor accomplishments. His career remained shuttling between the central and state administrations in New Delhi and Mumbai respectively. The book is designed with a bit too much bureaucratic perspective. Transfers and postings of secretaries after a change in administration are given undue prominence.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 3 Star

The Secret of Secrets

Title: The Secret of Secrets
Author: Dan Brown
Publisher: Bantam, 2025 (First)
ISBN: 9781787634558
Pages: 675

After a gap of eight years, here we have another great book from Dan Brown and the wait was worth it. Robert Langdon, the legendary American symbologist, is the protagonist who wades through one tangle after the other in this book whose storyline is set in Prague, the capital of Czechia. Langdon’s companion, Katherine Solomon, is a noetic scientist and the book she intends to publish on the secrets of human consciousness falls foul of the CIA who actually uses some of her ideas described in the book. The agency’s clever moves to thwart the pair and to destroy all copies of the manuscript in digital format leads eventually to the destruction of the largest mind-control experimental facility secretly built underground Prague. Apart from the thrilling and mysterious storyline, the book identifies the human mind as the world’s next battlefield. The future of technology lies in developing a perfect human-to-machine interface, without typing or dictating, but directly from the brain by thinking. Along with the lead cast, readers enjoy a virtual tour through Prague’s cityscape, geographical indicators, famous museums, cathedrals and hotels and a glance at the extraconstitutional influence the US ambassador wields in the country. The book introduces the philosophical concept of non-local consciousness which claims that there is no such thing as an individual’s consciousness and human brain does only to tune into the global consciousness which pervades the whole world as if a radio gets in sync with a particular station which then appears to others as the person’s mind or character. Believe me, Brown is subtle as well as intriguing in this thriller.

The book introduces the science of noetics which is the science of the intellect or pure thought, focusing on reason, mind and the origins of logic. One word of caution is prudent here: whenever you see the word science in this book, take it only with a pinch of salt. However, Brown colours the narrative with a touch of the paranormal and presents it as an addendum to parapsychology or out-of-the-body experience. This minor hitch definitely does not hinder the pleasure of reading it and the first thrill comes on page 32 itself. The idea of artificial neurons is developed in the book which is thought to control consciousness and would permanently alter the course of human history. Brown’s insight is sharp and transcends domains in its application and is evident in generalizations such as ‘the social media is the biggest intelligence gathering boon since the catholic church invented confession’. We know that the world is aging fast, and the percentage of old people is shooting up in developed economies which the others would surely follow once they trudge along the road of development and growth. Brown’s characters are youthful only in their spirit and in fact are aged well over fifty, including Langdon the hero and Katherine Solomon, his lover, who is in fact four years older than him. However, the narrative is very effective in displaying only the vigour of their demeanour which leaves the readers unsuspecting of their real age since their actions are so youthful in and out of bed, while Brown has included more scenes of the former variety in this book than was his wont!

This book’s focus is on human consciousness which is claimed to be non-local in the sense that humans can receive or reflect only a sliver of an external consciousness. This can be exploited to serve our needs and to enhance our capabilities such as visualizing a remote area without actually going there in person. In this scenario, it affords the ultimate spy camera if a suitable technology is developed to nudge a person to undergo an out-of-body experience and help it record the visual experience on to a storage medium to play back later without human intervention. I personally don’t believe or think it would ever be possible, but there is no denying that Brown has made very persuasive arguments in its favour. If you are spiritually oriented, it is very probable that you would become a fan. Study of human brain is said to be divided into two opposing philosophies – materialistic and noetic. Materialists believe that all phenomena, including consciousness, can be explained solely in terms of physical matter and its interactions. Noeticists think that consciousness is not created by brain processes but rather a fundamental aspect of the universe, like space, time and energy and was not even located inside the body. The heroine of the story, Katherine, is a noted noeticist and it is she who thinks up the exotic technologies to communicate electrically with the brain which is clandestinely appropriated by the CIA. Going a step further, she claims that human thoughts create reality and that this idea existed at the core of most major spiritual teachings. This is part of a conscious effort to bring in all religions into the narrative, however flimsy the occasion is. An instance that can be cited is that of employing the Vel spear of the south Indian god Murugan as part of the letter A in a monogram in the story. The book claims in the preface itself that all artwork, artefacts, symbols and documents in the novel are real and that all experiments, technologies and scientific results are true to life and that all organisations in the novel exist.

The city of Prague is as much a character in the story as is Langdon or Solomon. A city with a classical past is the normal fare of Brown novels and it is seen that Prague eminently suits the plot. It’s the city of a thousand spires and also a city of drama and fantasy. Revellers regularly walked the streets masquerading as storied characters from her rich history. An important character in the novel named Golem used this peculiarity of the city to go about the streets in full disguise. The book offers a fine tour of the landmarks of the city through the narrative and it would be extremely good if readers check the places up on Google along the way. Knowing fully well the predilection of our Indian taxi drivers to mislead their passengers to squeeze out something extra, it was somewhat heartening to read that Czech taxi drivers are no different and would take a roundabout route to extract a hefty fare from their unsuspecting passengers. Another notable point is the hegemony US diplomats exercise in Prague. The US ambassador is seen directly ordering Czech law enforcement officials and forcibly releasing American suspects from their custody. The embassy has control of the surveillance system in the city and its officials can track the route taken by any person.

It’s a little unfortunate that this book promotes the pseudoscientific concept of global consciousness to imagine startling inventions that are mindboggling. It is suggested that there is no such thing as an individual’s consciousness residing in his or her brain. Even a person’s memory data sits outside the brain and is accessed from there each time, much like cloud computing. Global consciousness hovers in the universe and individual brains tune in to a particular source or channel and access data, like a radio receiver tuning in to a station. It is the development of some filters in the brain that prevents one from tuning in to another person’s channel. By this logic, extra sensory perception (ESP) is a brain tuning in to information that it normally filters out. Precognition is also explained away with a similar contraption. Brown then uses the common charlatan trick of hanging on to quantum physics to reason out implausible phenomena whereas quantum theory throws a disclaimer up front that its conclusions are valid and applicable only in the micro-realm and do not affect the macro objects. Concealing such caveats, Brown freely translates experiments in quantum mechanics into the spiritual realm. There is also an unabashed argument on authority in claims such as ‘some very smart minds believed future events did indeed affect past events’ (p.337). The author fails to realize that it is not the smartness of the mind, but of the idea that carries weight in science. The book further suggests that consciousness exists in the quantum field. An unpardonable license taken by the author is that he clubs Newton, Einstein and Galileo with religious prophets regarding attaining enlightenment and observes that ‘these brilliant minds had scientific epiphanies and spiritual revelations that can be explained in scientific terms’. When we die, our consciousness returns to the universal one and a life begins after death. He then makes a bold yet more or less irresponsible finding that hallucinogens such as LSD open up a wider spectrum of reality and help to see more of it. This reminds us of the need of Sherlock Holmes’ children’s versions to remove those portions in which the famous detective uses drugs.

The book is structured in the same mould as his earlier best sellers like Da Vinci Code or Angels and Demons, with a slew of code breaking, secret messages, hurried chases across the city filled with artistic and architecturally notable buildings. What is impressive is his uncanny ability to demand the undiluted attention of the reader and the total immersion it guarantees. The significance of the title becomes evident in the epilogue along with the message he tries to convey. I just noted down the concepts, ideas and even gadgets he mentions in the book and of which I was not aware beforehand and it runs from secure virtual workspaces, laser microphone, UV resin, near-field communication, superconducting magnetic energy storage to body jet showers! With this brilliant line of sophistication, it is quite odd to find him mentioning ‘fluorescent lights flickering on’, especially since the fluorescent lighting has long since yielded their place to LED lighting which does not flicker and attains full brightness instantaneously.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star