Songs of Blood and Sword

Title: Songs of Blood and Sword – A Daughter’s Memoir

Author: Fatima Bhutto

Publisher: Penguin/Viking, 2010 (First)

ISBN: 978-0-670-08280-3

Pages: 438

The author, Fatima Bhutto is the daughter of Murtaza Bhutto, the son of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who was the prime minister of Pakistan during 1970s. The book covers a daughter’s fond memories of her father who rebelled against a military junta who killed her grand father and had to go in exile to escape punishment. Murtaza fought elections while still in exile and won but was killed in a police encounter purportedly orchestrated by his brother-in-law, Asif Ali Zardari, the current President of the strife-ravaged country. Fatima witnessed the growth of her father in the political arena and had the misfortune to be an eyewitness to his untimely death.

The Bhutto family is one of Asia’s most prominent political dynasties in terms of the power they wielded over the lives of millions of fellow country men. They were feudal landholders with ancestry traceable back to Rajput warriors who emigrated from Rajastan. As is the wont of feudal lords everywhere, they maintained their domain on the good books of powers that be. Shahnawaz Bhutto was knighted by the British, while his son, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto first appeared on the national scene with a birth in the military dictator Ayub Khan’s cabinet. With power comes risk and many Bhuttos died a violent death. Zulfikar was hanged by opponents in 1979, Benazir assassinated in 2007, Murtaza killed in 1996 and the author’s uncle, Shahnawaz was found dead in mysterious circumstances in 1985. Tallying the family’s political gains against their emotional and financial losses through Zulfikar’s land reforms which made them lose property and murders which eliminated family members, we doubt whether the risk was worth the reputation power brought with it.

Zulfikar was the most pragmatic and the first well-educated member of the family. Though the author paints her grand father’s democratic ideals in glowing terms, his joining General Ayub’s cabinet belies the argument. When Bhutto became foreign minister, he paved the way for Pakistan to become bosom friends with China, cashing in on China’s ill will with India in the aftermath of its war in 1962. He was indirectly responsible for Pakistan’s wars with India. When Mujib-ur Rahman’s Awami League won the elections in 1970, Zulfikar refused to share power with him and Mujib was thrown into prison by General Yahya Khan who was the President. A civil war erupted between East and West Pakistan in which the Pak Army unleashed most heinous forms of terror against its own fellow citizens in the East of the country. Rape was institutionalized as a tactical weapon to stigmatize the Bengalis. As the author remarks, Bangladeshi women were taken as sex slaves by Pak Army regiments. When the refugee influx grew to become a serious concern, India intervened militarily and defeated the Pak troops stationed in present-day Bangladesh. Pakistan was split into two and this was a sleight Zulfikar could never forget, who vowed to fight ‘a hundred years with India’.

When he became the prime minister, Zulfikar alienated people close to him with high-handed measures. He was deposed in 1977 by Gen. Zia ul Haq, whom he had elevated to the top army post overlooking the seniority of five officers. Zia plotted against him, incarcerated him and finally hanged him in 1979 after a hastily conducted mockery of a trial. Murtaza, who was studying in London pledged armed struggle against the regime and chose Kabul in neighbouring Afghanistan as his base, where the author was born. Afghanistan’s occupation by the Soviets complicated matters. Murtaza and his associates found restrictions on their freedom for maneuvering. They were alleged to be involved in terrorist activities including the hijacking of a civilian airliner. He and his brother relocated to Damascus who was soon found dead in mysterious circumstances while on vacation in the south of France.

Meanwhile, things were changing in Pakistan. Gen. Zia was bent on converting the largely secular state into a fiercely guarded theocracy. Clerics were given undue power with authority to overturn the decisions of constitutional bodies. Sharia law was imposed and freedom of women severely curtailed. A set of archaic rules were enacted as Hudood ordinance which even prescribed punishment to rape victims too on the grounds that they had participated in a forbidden sexual act. Zia assisted the hardcore Islamic militia under Taliban to fight against Russian occupation. Harsh censoring was imposed on the press and rebels were summarily imprisoned to serve long terms. All political activity in Pakistan ground to a halt until Zia was killed in a plane crash in 1988. Democracy made a hesitant comeback and Benazir was elected prime minister – a term which lasted hardly two years before being dismissed on the allegations of widespread corruption. Asif Ali Zardari, her husband, had earned the nickname of Mr. Ten Per cent, an allusion to his rate of commission in government contracts.

When elections were declared in 1993, Murtaza contested to Sindh provincial assembly and won from exile. He returned to Pakistan in 1994 on a wave of jubilation, but was summarily packed off to jail from the airport itself on account of terrorism charges levelled against him during Zia’s regime. He was soon granted bail and formed his own party, the Pakistan People’s Party (Shahid Bhutto) as a pawn against his sister’s PPP. Murtaza riled against Benazir, who was the prime minister when Karachi was embroiled in a bloody ethnic strife between the native Sindhis and Muhajirs, who had immigrated from India during partition. Corruption, which skyrocketed and became a national issue was also a point of contention between the siblings. Two years later, he was killed in an alleged fake police encounter orchestrated by Asif Zardari, his brother-in-law. Though the family proceeded legally against him, their argument was thrown out by the courts later.

Even though the book cannot be credited with any extraordinary level of brilliance, we see in it the very high level of emotional bonding between a daughter and her father. Born and living in exile, young Bhutto adored her parents who were soon to be separated, casting her into the custody of her father. She was lucky to have a sympathetic and loving stepmother, but it is only natural that she had an inseparable affinity to her father. The hardships she had had to face while still quite young might appear to be devastating to any lesser mortals, but coming from a high profile family which controlled the stakes in national politics, Fatima Bhutto is well poised to take all miseries in her stride and continue her journey with grace. The book provides a good picture of Pakistani society from 1975 onwards when the country slowly began the slide downhill to the chasm of religious rule.

On the downside, it must be remarked that the author has pursued her preordained agenda irrespective of inputs from her interviewees. Many times, we get the impression that her subjects echo what she herself wanted to say. Through a psychological process, Fatima appears to put words in her subjects’ mouths, or less charitably, it might be a case of outright falsification of facts. The book is also riddled with sharp and irrational criticism against her aunt, Benazir. Even cases of childhood ruckus are projected out of all proportion so as to look like a grave injustice has been done. Selective reading from Benazir’s diaries make her emerge as a mentally unbalanced person. The author’s indirect accusation that she was behind Murtaza’s brother’s death, which was pronounced to be a suicide, also doesn’t look credible. The most severe shortcoming of the book may be argued to be her supporting the terrorist elements – in an indirect way – holed up in the country’s lawless North-Western province. She criticizes the national government and the U.S., which regularly conduct unmanned drone attacks against suspected militant hideouts. Though the attacks are performed inside Pakistani territory without the knowledge of its government, there is no denying that elimination of hardline elements is beneficial to Pakistan as a whole.

The book contains a lot of typographical errors, unexpected from a Penguin-group publication. Historical inaccuracies may also be traced, as in a suggestion that Khilafat movement took place around the second World War (p.187). Fatima’s sense of proportion is again called into question by a grossly overemphasizing adjective she uses for a crowd which assembled to hear her father speak. She says, “a huge crowd of about 2000 people had gathered for the Surjani town meeting” (p.29) – remember, this is in the suburbs of a city of 18 million people!

The book is recommended.

Rating: 3 Star

From the Holy Mountain

Title: From the Holy Mountain – A Journey in the Shadow of Byzantium

Author: William Dalrymple

Publisher: Flamingo, 1998 (First published 1997)

ISBN: 978-0-00-654774-7

Pages: 463

Ever the incessant travel writer and story teller familiar to us as one who stays here in India, taking in its eccentricities, beliefs and mannerisms, William Dalrymple needs no introduction. With his chaste diction in which he radically differs from Justin Marozzi, another equally great writer and the superb narrative escalate him to one of the great writers of the genre. He is one of my favourite authors, with his titles The Last Mughal, White Mughals, Nine Lives and City of Djinns reviewed earlier in this blog. Once you start reading one of his works, you just can’t put him down until it is finished – as simple as that! In this book, Dalrymple travels around the Mediterranean littoral, retracing the foot steps of an ancient monk through Greece, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel and Egypt over a period of five months in 1994. The itinerary is comparable to Justin Marozzi’s, as detailed in his book The Man Who Invented History, (reviewed earlier) journeying on the route taken by Herodotus, the father of history to Greece, Turkey, Iraq and Egypt. With these two books side by side, you get a good glimpse of how life goes on in the present Middle East.

Traveling on the path of ancient travel writers is an exhilarating experience as you get the lucky chance to tread the paths, stay in the same cities and take in all scenes that came along the way, exactly like your forebear did in his less technically advanced modes of travel. The author follows John Moschos, an ancient Christian monk in Galilee who wrote The Spiritual Meadow, cataloging his travel and religious experiences gathered during his travel with a fellow monk Sophronius, who later went on to become the Patriarch of Jerusalem. The conditions which obtained in the Middle East in 578 CE when he began his travel which ended in early 7^th century was radically different from that which exist today. The region was overwhelmingly Christian, bickering among themselves for minute ecclesiastical details along the lines of Greek Orthodox,  Syrian Orthodox, Monophysite, Nestorian, Armenian and a lot of minor fringe groups. The kings and commoners were oblivious to the dark clouds forming over the Arabian desert in the form of Islam. Hardly a century later, the Christian kingdoms were swept off the face of the earth in the torrent that was to unleash from the followers of the Prophet. The Byzantine emperor clung on to a titular throne until 1453 when the city of Constantinople itself fell to the Ottoman Muslims.

In stark contrast to the conditions prevailed when Moschos made his journey in late 6^th century, when Christianity dominated the region, the author finds it overwhelmingly Muslim and the number of Christians dwindling year by year by means of emigration, deportation and alienation by the Muslim regimes. This is nowhere more apparent than Turkey where Christians and their religious institutions are systematically erased off the landscape. The Turks might have some justification for dispelling the Greek Christians, citing a narrow interpretation of nationalism. Turkey and Greece continue to foster enmity going back to several centuries. In response to Turkish actions, Greeks had razed mosques in Athens and other places. But no such excuse hold water for the Turks’ ghastly treatment of its Armenian Christian minority. Dalrymple saw with his own eyes the conversion of an ancient Armenian church to a mosque – in the year 1994! And you thought Turkey was aspiring to join the European Union! Though vying for a place in the European community, archeological values don’t find merit in Turkish eyes if it is on the wrong side of the religious divide. Even now, the oppression Syrian Christians feel is immense. The author himself was stopped and harassed by Turkish police many times, the army even arresting him. On one occasion, we see the security personnel behaving like hooligans at a monastery, just because they provided accommodation to the author.

But Syria offered a picture diametrically opposite to the situation in Turkey. Christians enjoy equal rights and it fact occupy some of the very top posts in the military. Freedom of religion is guaranteed and at many places, both Muslims and Christians pray together. Dalrymple however sounds a warning this oasis in the desert of Islamic fanaticism may not outlast the reign of Asad family who holds Syria in a Soviet-style dictatorship of its Baath party. Himself belonging to a fringe Muslim sect, the Asads encouraged the minorities who are now fearing a backlash when the Islamic fundamentalists oust Asad. The battle is raging on now in Syria, at this writing. Astonishingly, when the author travels to Lebanon, the situation is completely turned on its head. We learn about the atrocities perpetrated by Christian extremists when they had absolute power in the 1970s and 80s. The gruesome violence and massacre executed in the name of religion don’t look different if the culprits are Muslims or Christians. The Maronite Christians had gone on the rampage when it remotely looked like they’d be able to claim the whole of Lebanon for themselves. They exhibited arrogantly superior attitude against their brethren of different faiths, speaking only in French and shunning Arabic, which is the lingua franca of the region. The rise of Hezbollah put paid to the hopes of Maronites.

A short visit to Israel clearly illustrate the moral lessons we saw earlier in Turkey and Lebanon – that the majority religion persecutes the minor ones. Jews, discriminated against everywhere settles the scores on the hapless Muslims and Christians still staying in the holy land. Dalrymple narrates merciless tales of forcible evictions and takeovers the regime regularly unleash on the minorities to make way for townships and kibbutz to house the settlers immigrating from various parts of the world. We may deduce from the scale of highhandedness and resistance to it that peace in Israel is still a long way away. In the last leg of the journey, we move on Egypt – Alexandria and Kharga oasis, to be precise. There too, the ethnic Coptic Christians are beginning to feel the heat of Islamic fundamentalism. Their plight was sinking more and more into despair when Dalrymple visited there in 1994 when Hosni Mubarak still presided over a secular administration. The rampant Islamicization was choking the life out of innocent Copts. Though a secular regime ruled over the land, religious affairs were still administered by the draconian Hamayonic laws which stipulated that Christians need permission from the President of the country himself, to build new churches or repair old ones. Technically, they have to seek permission even to patch up a dysfunctional lavatory in the monastery while mosques were mushrooming all over the country without any legal hassle to slow down the growth rate.

In the characteristic Dalrymple style, the author sketches a faithful and vibrant picture of how life is being lived out by the minorities in the Middle East. We can’t accuse him of siding with the Christians or looking only through the eyes of priests even though he was retracing the footsteps of a monk and accepting the hospitality of the same monasteries depicted in The Spiritual Meadow. Whether in Turkey, Lebanon, Israel or Egypt, the author’s sympathies lay with the oppressed. The narrative goads us to realize the dangerous and fatal prominence enjoyed by religion in shaping the outlook of whole societies. Whatever be the religion, the dominating one in a country persecutes the others and make life difficult for its practitioners. The minorities in India may also take a potent lesson from the harsh realities their coreligionists undergo in the Middle East and compare their paradise-like life in this country under a very liberal religious tolerance extended to them. The book also describes in a nutshell the origins of Christian iconography from Egyptian religions. The images we see portrayed, like St.George slaying the dragon, Christ child in the virgin’s bosom are too often adaptations of similar pictorial myths from ancient Egypt and nothing whatsoever to do with the tenets of Christianity.

The book contain a good number of monochrome and colour plates portraying the places of interest. It also graced by a comprehensive glossary and an index. The only thing we can arraign against the work is the sometimes uncanny interest shown by the author in eliciting an accusation from a victim against the oppressors. It is definitely the natural course for the truth to come out, but the interviewees are often terrified of the consequences when the material is published and they themselves are destined to face the music. Sometimes, the author is simply asked to leave them in peace in a rough way. Still, clinging on to the journalistic passion hidden beneath the layer of travel writing, Dalrymple follows up each lead turning up to its logical conclusion. Sometimes he travels to dangerous localities, just to obtain the testimony of a harassed person so that the world can see and judge for themselves the scale of tyranny heaped on the less fortunate ones.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star

Dreams and Shadows

Title: Dreams and Shadows – The Future of the Middle East

Author: Robin Wright

Publisher: Penguin, 2009 (First published 2008)

ISBN: 978-0-14-311489-5

Pages: 419

Just a word before the review. This is the 200th book review in this blog. When I started reviewing books way back in 2006 on Rediff Blog, I never thought even once that I had the energy to reach this much.  I thought it to be another new year resolve that would go nowhere after some time. Unexpectedly, I found out to my own astonishment, that I enjoy reading. It may seem a bit of an understatement with the long list of posts on the right pane, but to tell the truth, I never realized I loved reading. Some emotions are like that - you never know you had it, until one day you'll be aware of nothing else! I am not at all concerned about whether anyone would read  this blog. It won't surprise me if nobody would bother to read this amateur stuff, because I, myself have not troubled to read any of the posts again. Many errors or mistakes you might find are due to my own laziness. So, heartfelt thanks to anyone who would be reading these lines.

This is not just another book on the Middle East. Robin Wright is a prominent journalist who has reported from more than 140 countries and has covered a dozen wars and revolutions in various parts of the globe. She has received many laurels for journalistic feats and is the author of many books on the Middle East. With the flair characteristic of journalists, she fearlessly steps into hotspots in the troubled region and elicits interviews and responses from the major players in the political game. The Middle East is in fact an abstract entity, spanning over 20 nations and two continents. It is not monolithic even by any liberal application of the term, though it is often assumed as such by other people. Its religions include Islam, which undoubtedly forms an overarching influence over the others, and a smattering of Jews and Christians. Arabic is the common language, but Farsi and Turkish are not to be discounted. Flushed with oil money, the region boasts of some of the highest percapita incomes in the world. However, it miserably falls short on other parameters of affluence, like democracy, freedom, education and women’s rights. Its countries are ruled by absolute monarchs or political dictators. The book brings to focus the budding modes of protest against authoritarian rule, but since it was published in 2008, it misses the Jasmine revolutions which convulsed the region in a paroxysm of pain on the path to a new birth. The author recognises correctly that in the run up to democratic freedom, they have to start discussion on three basic issues – political prisoners, women’s rights and political Islam.

Palestine is the most widely known Arab non-state. The term is synonymous with oppression and terror ever since Israel came into existence in 1948. First steps on the path to nationhood were taken with 1993 Oslo Accord which poised to form a Palestinian Authority to rule over land assigned to Palestinians. Things are more complicated with many Palestinians’ hardline stance in not recognising Israel’s right to exist. Most of them, with Hamas in the front line, don’t use the term Israel for their neighbour and mention it disparagingly as the Zionist entity. Yasser Arafat and his Fatah movement saw the writing on the wall at the right time in choosing the path of conciliation, even though they themselves had as blood-stained a past as any other terrorist organisation. Wright accuses Arafat and his successor Mahmoud Abbas of widespread corruption and cronyism which fertilized the growth of Hamas, the militant Islamic outfit which won the elections in 2006. Between a parliament dominated by Hamas and an executive dominated by Fatah, Palestine is now a divided house.

When the author visited Egypt in 2005-06, it was on the verge of another sham election called by Hosni Mubarak’s regime. Ever since his ascent to power in 1981 after Anwar Sadat’s assassination, Mubarak held all democratic institutions under his vice-like grip. The domination was so complete and his rule so unchallanged that it is said to be the third longest reign by any king or ruler in Egypt’s 6000-year old history. However, by 2005, some half-hearted measures were accepted by the authoritarian regime and the main opposition party, the Muslim Brotherhood, had come out in the open. Author’s comments about the political spectrum in Egypt concludes in 2006 on a note of frustration for the democratic aspirants, but we now know that they finally went on to topple Mubarak as part of Jasmine revolutions which swept through the area in 2011-12.

Lebanon is a unique example of religious coexistence among the otherwise monolithic Arab region. Christians and Muslims constitute almost equal sizes of populations. Nevertheless, the very high birthrate of Shiite Muslims and emigration of Christians to other countries has tilted the balance towards the Islamic side. A Shiite terrorist organisation, called Hezbollah (Party of God) led by the fiery cleric Hassan Nasrallah now leads the nation both politically and militarily thanks to its heroic resistance against Israeli incursion into Lebanon in 2006. Israel, with its vastly superior airpower and conventional ground forces, could not achieve the easy victory it sought and obtained as in the previous battles. The militants had in fact invited the Jewish state for a retaliation as the basic grounds of war was the ambush and kidnapping of Israeli soldiers inside its territory. Even with crippling damage to the country’s infrastructure as a result of Israeli bombing, the guerilla resistance fighters were able to bask at the comparison to David and Goliath.

Syria is another entity riddled with dynastic rule. Hafez al Assad assumed presidency in 1970 and continued for 30 years, till his death in 2000. Assad brushed away dissidents, opposition leaders and intellectuals who had anything to say against his diktats. His son Bashar al Assad, who succeeded him in 2000 was at first optimistic about providing democratic freedoms, but soon changed track and followed his late father’s repressive footsteps when the opposition turned out to be more than he could chew. But the country which is having greater and greater influence over others in the Middle East is Iran. It initiated a new era after Khomeini’s Islamic Revolution in 1979. It opposes every western ideal, artifact or cultural feat. Even as the years roll by, the regime is getting even more hardline, now the laity also speaking in harsher tone than the clerics themselves as evidenced by Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, the current President. He won the elections in 2005, upsetting the formidable cleric Rafsanjani and then began an unrelenting quest for nuclear weapons by clandestine uranium enrichment, inviting crippling economic sanctions in the bargain. Even now, the people in Iran think that their country leads others in science or progressive ideas, and the world is trying to contain them with not much room to manouvre.

Wright also discusses Morocco and Iraq, where the U.S. committed its greatest mistake since Vietnam. In all countries, we see unenthusiastic measures at reform which itself are few and modest. An example is cited in Morocco in 1993 when it allowed some changes to its arcane family laws, among them: brides had to consent to marriage, husbands needed a wife’s permission to take other wives!

Drawing on the vast network of acquaintances in the region, Robin Wright has done a very good job of analysing the region – its politics, society and religion – in detail and showing what’s needed to be done. She has not fallen prey to the folly of many westerners in prescribing what’s good for the Middle East. Instead, she examines noted personalities in the arena and presents a balanced view of the desired future course, coming right from the horse’s mouth. The first-person account of happenings though invariably coloured by the preferences or prejudices of the speakers, presents a refreshingly accurate version of the ground realities. The book also dispels the myth that the Middle East is a community of religious fanatics. The vivid personal details given about the constituents of the region make us convince that the ordinary man on the street faces the same problems and same challenges, but different opportunities that we all encounter in our lives whether we live in a developed European country or a famished African nation. The book gives some anecdotes about the communal life in many countries. A humorous one depicts the anger the Iranian people feel towards the clerics. It says, “Tehran taxis often do not stop to pick up clerics. An Iranian friend recounted his own ride in a group taxi on a particularly hot day. His taxi next pulled over to pick up a cleric who had been standing on a curb under the cooling cover of a leafy tree. Two blocks later, the cabbie stopped and told the cleric to get out. My friend asked the driver what he was doing. “I didn’t want him to have the benefit of the shade,” the cabbie replied” (p.298).

The book looks somewhat outdated, written in 2007. The revolutions which rampaged the region in 2011-12 changed the shape of polity in a cataclysmic way. The author may think about coming up with a newer version any time soon. It also suffers the shortcoming that it was brought out by a journalistic impulse – by interviews and conversations, rather than by a scholarly effort. History has not been given due importance in many of the chapters when setting the background for the current conflict.

The book is recommended.

Rating: 3 Star

The Complete Yes Prime Minister

Title: The Complete Yes Prime Minister

Author: Jonathan Lynn and Antony Jay

Publisher: BBC Books, 2001 (First published 1986)

ISBN: 0-563-20773-6

Pages: 488

‘Yes Prime Minister’ was a very popular political satire aired by the BBC between 1986 and 1988. Written by Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn, it was a sequel to the program ‘Yes Minister’ transmitted between 1980 and 1984. Set in the Cabinet office of Jim Hacker, the ‘Prime Minister’ in the story, it humorously relates his struggles to formulate legislation which were poised to help the country get over difficult times and equally defiant struggle by the Civil Service to block anything which has the potential to change the status-quo. Jim Hacker, played by Paul Eddington is assisted by his Cabinet Secretary Sir Humphrey Appleby (played by Nigel Hawthorne), his Principal Private Secretary Bernard Woolley (played by Derek Fowlds) and several lesser characters. This sitcom which was an out and out critic of the British administrative system has won several awards and was voted sixth in the Britain’s Best Sitcom poll. It is said that it was the favourite television programme of the then British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

Jim Hacker is quite unexpectedly elevated to Number Ten, when the present incumbent decides to quit in order to pave the way for his successor. The political struggle which ensued saw two men fighting for the top post, but who had very unfavourable remarks about them with the Intelligence Bureau, which, if exposed would have led to serious embarrassment for the party and the government. Hacker is selected as the consensus candidate. Right from the beginning, his assistants, Sir Humphrey and Woolley try to block any move which would seem threatening, even in the mildest way, to the Civil Service. Having no experience with the intricacies of the internal working of Civil Service, Hacker often falls prey to the machinations of the bureaucrats. The encounters and meetings between the principal characters of the play offer hilarious moments for the reader. Sir Humphrey, who is an expert in getting what he intended even against the wishes of his boss, the Prime Minister is a quintessential Civil Servant. With his encyclopedic knowledge of the channels of communication between various departments, he often plays one against the other to get at what he wanted. Having no compunction or dedication to what is good or moral, he rides like a juggernaut with full control of what Hacker is up to.

The contrasting ideals of the characters are noteworthy. Being a politician, or despite of, Hacker often comes up with innovative solutions to the nation’s problems, whereas the civil servants genuinely believe that they only know what is best for the country and the others are not trained or qualified to govern it. For them, democracy is only an evil they have to live with – an occupational hazard at the worst! Most of Sir Humphrey’s actions are motivated by his wish to maintain the prestige, power and authority he enjoys.

The book is full of thoroughly entertaining comments, repartee and asides between the protagonists. Sir Humphrey and Woolley are the masters of word play, though it often ends in Hacker being utterly confused about the meaning of what his subordinates had just said. Some witty remarks found in the text are,

a)      So long as there is anything to be gained by saying nothing, it is always better to say nothing than anything.

b)      Never believe anything until it is officially denied.

c)      We have a system of government with the engine of a lawn-mower and the brakes of a Rolls-Royce.

d)      (In a discussion) facts complicate things

e)      The history of the world is the triumph of the heartless over the mindless

f)        He (Jim Hacker) raised the average age of the Cabinet, but lowered the average IQ

g)      If you want to get into the Cabinet, learn how to speak. If you want to stay in the Cabinet, learn how to keep your mouth shut

h)      Never speak when you are angry. If you do, you’ll make the best speech you’ll ever regret

In their never-ending pursuit of self-serving methods, the bureaucracy holds nothing sacred and we find them forever willing to change the official minutes (records of meeting) if it suits them. Sir Humphrey justifies it as, “While it is true that the minutes are indeed an authoritative record of the Committee’s deliberations, it is nevertheless undeniable that a deliberate attempt at comprehensive delineation of every contribution and interpolation would necessitate an unjustifiable elaboration and wearisome extension of the documentation” (p.288). Jim Hacker finally acknowledges that there is nothing much he could do against the established prejudice that is the civil service. Hacker says, “Suddenly I saw, with a real clarity that I’d never enjoyed before, that although I might win occasional policy victory, or make some reforms, or be indulged with a few scraps from the table, nothing fundamental was ever ever going to change” (p.488).

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star

Taming the Infinite

Title: Taming the Infinite – The Story of Mathematics

Author: Ian Stewart

Publisher:  Quercus, 2009 (First published 2008)

ISBN: 978-1-84724-768-1

Pages: 373

Professor Ian Stewart is a noted scholar with over 170 published papers and a world-renowned popularizer of mathematics. He has authored many books on the subject. This book describes the journey of mathematics from ancient prehistorical times to the present in a neatly classified version which lists important branches of mathematics individually and traces their origins and growth over the ages. Mathematics divides the society into two camps, those who love it and those who detest it. Unfortunately, most of those who dislike it had had exposure only to arithmetic, which forms only a small part of the gigantic whole. The subject has grown far and wide encompassing all walks of life including science, engineering, economy and even biological systems. Stewart succinctly narrates the development of each idea in turn and in detail.

Numbers form the foundations on which civilizations are built. All ancient ones, like Mesopotamia and Egypt had one, but the number system of the former was more advanced – some of which we still employ, like 365 days to a year and 60 minutes to an hour. They introduced a notation for numbers for the first time and used it to record planetary data and to calculate eclipses. Geometry, which was another important segment, originated from the springs of Greek intellect. Pythagoras, Eudoxus, Euclid and Archimedes were the founding fathers of the new science, who emphasized on logical proof to demonstrate an assertion which forms the basis of modern mathematical theory even now. Eratosthenes found the circumference of earth by measuring the deviation of the shadow cast by a pole from the vertical. His estimate was 250,000 stadia, but unfortunately we don’t know how much a stadium was long. However, his logic was impeccable and contained elements of trigonometry. Number notation developed independently in many countries, but the most widely used system at present came from India and diffused by Arabs around the known world. Leonardo of Pisa, also known as Fibonacci learned it while trading with Arabs in North Africa in the 13^th century and introduced it to Europe where it spread rapidly after Renaissance. This development developed Simon Stevin to formulate the now familiar decimal point notation in 16^th century, as an alternative to fractional notation.

Moving on to algebra, we find that traces of algebraic formulations are seen in ancient Babylonian clay tablets, including a general recipe for solving quadratic equations. But the term algebra, comes from Arabic al-jabr which means ‘adding equal amounts to both sides’, proposed by scholar Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi around 820 CE. He is the eponym for the term algorithm too. Renaissance Europe proved to be a fertile ground for new concepts like analytical geometry and number theory. From here onwards, what we now study in schools and colleges are the sole products of great mathematicians and scientists from 16^th century. A fundamental change in the treatment of geometry came along after Rene Descartes proposed the coordinate system. Till that time, figures and shapes were the results of rotations, or slicing of some shapes by others, but then the forms themselves were recognized to be graphs of functions with profound significance.

Number theory, a crucial component of modern mathematics also developed around this time, particularly under the able Fermat who got the impetus from Greek mathematicians Euclid and Diophantus. This was further developed and systematized by Gauss, the Prince of Mathematicians. The theory was without any practical applications until digital communication came along in late 20^th century where it is extensively used for encrypting and decrypting messages. However, of all mathematical concepts which directly apply to nature, none is more profound than calculus, the principle of variation. Newton and Leibniz developed it from first principles quite independently, but Leibniz published first. In the modern setting, this fact would have clinched the deal in favour of Leibniz. But Newton being Newton and the British being British, it kindled a controversy which raged for a century between the British and Continental mathematicians with the result that England turned into a backwater as far as mathematics was concerned. The symbols we use today in calculus was proposed by Leibniz, which comes in two forms – the differential and the integral. The former deals with rates of change of a quantity, tangent to a curve and finding maxima and minima, while the latter is concerned with calculation of area or volume under a curve or surface. All branches of exact sciences use calculus in one form or the other.

Stewart then gives an account of modern mathematics, which developed after 1800, like imaginary numbers, group theory, topology and abstract mathematics, which is not very absorbing for the general reader. The curious fact we get to know is that though these ideas seem so pedantic or not relevant in a practical sense, they quite unexpectedly turn up to provide a solution to a vexing problem or supply proof to a long standing unresolved conjecture. A case in point is Fermat’s last theorem, which was proved by Andrew Wiles in 1995, after 350 years since it was first proposed, using concepts developed in the 20^th century. Details of the interesting quest for proof may be obtained from Simon Singh’s impressive book, Fermat’s Last Theorem, which was reviewed earlier in this blog.

The final part of the book deals with new vistas opened up in mathematics during 20^th century. The quantity of theories and new areas developed during the last two centuries in the field outnumber all that has gone before in the previous 4000 years. Chaos theory, complexity theory and algorithmic theory are only a few ich was another important  for the first time and used it to record planetary data and to calculate eclipses. cal syarrows in the mathematician’s quiver. Many of them don’t find much use at present, but as was the case with several other theories which proved to be immensely practical, this phenomenon is not something new.

The book is neatly pigeonholed into component categories. The author convincingly answers the question often posed by some against the teaching of arithmetic to students in the present era when electronic calculators and computers obviate the need for manual calculations. He argues that though most people don’t need arithmetic to perform calculations as such, it is essential for those future scientists and engineers who will be building newer computers and calculators. Modern civilization would quickly break down if arithmetic is not taught and technology allowed to stagnate. The time span covered by the book is immense – 4000 years, right from the beginning in the uncertain light of a prehistoric dawn to modern concepts like chaos theory.

Nevertheless, the book is burdened with several drawbacks to be pointed out against, the least of which is the carelessness in faithfully reproducing a critical number. The base of natural logarithm is given as 2.7128… (on page 101) where it should be 2.71828…. The error is obviously a printing mistake, but when you introduce the number as the one of the most important numbers in mathematics, you have to be more careful. The book supplies a lot of informatory asides – in fact a little more than what was necessary. While providing details of the topic under discussion, the multitude of such boxes detracts readers from pursuing the main thread. These include biographical sketches of mathematicians on which Stewart does not forget to include every female mathematician who most often had only a fleeting relevance to the theme under survey. The volume is arranged into several chapters, perhaps mutually exclusive. It provides for subject-wise continuity but not the chronological coherence when taken as a whole. It appears to be a collection of chapters, not the development of an integrated idea. The most disheartening feature is that the book turns complex and devoid of interest after the midpoint. Only serious readers or students of higher mathematics might find the part useful.

The book is recommended only for serious readers who are mathematically inclined in an earnest way.

Rating: 2 Star