There can be no relation more strange, more critical, than that between two beings who know each other only with their eyes, who meet daily, yes, even hourly, eye each other with a fixed regard, and yet by some whim or freak of convention feel constrained to act like strangers.

and one more:

Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous – to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.

Q. Have you read anything by Chetan Bhagat?
A. Nope.

An interesting passage in the book involves a conversation between Juan Batista, the head of a publishing company in Chile, and Changez who has been sent there to value the firm that could leave Juan Batista without his job. Juan Batista asks Changez if it troubled him that he made his living by disrupting the lives of others. Changez responds that they just value, and are indifferent to the consequences. Juan Batista then tells him about the Janissaries – Christian boys that were taken from their families at an early age where they had not formed any memories they could go back to, and trained to be ferocious and utterly loyal soldiers of the Ottoman army. “They fought to erase their own civilization”, says Batista, “so they had nothing else to return to.” This is Changez’s moment of truth. Given the US pressures on Pakistan in the post-9/11 operations, Changez comes to think of himself as a janissary of this powerful nation working against his own people.

Yet this leap of logic is a hard one for the reader to make. Changez’s work is within the corporate world, his valuations could result in job losses for others in the US and has got nothing to do with US military operations. Moreover, US dealings with Pakistan is largely one of association. The Pakistan-India rift is portrayed as one where the US supports India against Pakistan, perhaps to render import to the message that Hamid tries to convey of the US being a superpower imposing itself on a small country. Even if so, the association that Changez makes with his work within corporate America and the political landscape, characterizing himself as a janissary in this imagined battle of the US against Pakistan ends up being a weak one. He has not been personally affronted by the sporadic post 9/11 backlash. His love interest with Erica does not suffer because of the differences in their backgrounds. The main pretext for Changez’s return ends up being the political one, and that does not stand strong on its own ground.

Hamid’s writing style, as I noted earlier, is engaging enough to make you want to read through to the very end. Changez’s personal story as recounted in the first half of the book in engrossing. He is 22-years old, just out of college, and yet he demonstrates the maturity of one much older. The contrast and conflict between one’s past and present are captured well. The reasons that lead up to the final denouement aside, the novel is a very fine read. A movie based on the novel is being directed by Mira Nair, and set to release only in 2013.

In youth, it was a way I had
To do my best to please,
And change, with every passing lad,
To suit his theories.

But now I know the things I know,
And do the things I do;
And if you do not like me so,
To hell, my love, with you!

For guys reading the book, there’s more direct reproach. A poem titled Men begins:

They hail you as their morning star
Because you are the way you are.
If you return the sentiment,
They’ll try to make you different;

where ‘they’ are the lot of men, and ‘you’ the gentle female reader. The poem ends with the declaration:

They’d alter all that they admired.
They make me sick, they make me tired.

There are the occasional interludes of love, as in the poem Day-Dreams

If you and I were one, my dear,
A model life we’d lead.
We’d travel on, from year to year,
At no increase of speed.
Ah, clear to me the vision of
The things that we should do!
And so I think it best, my love,
To string along as two.

This sentiment is carried forward in another poem titled Love Song, that begins:

My own dear love, he is strong and bold
And he cares not what comes after.
His words ring sweet as chime of gold,
And his eyes are lit with laughter.

and ends with the following lines – the last of which I haven’t quite been able to interpret.

He’ll live his days where the sunbeam start,
Nor could storm or wind uproot him.
My own dear love, he is all my heart, -
And I wish somebody’d shoot him.

If the above lines make you feel all lovey-dovey, the poem Unfortunate Coincidences helps dispel that.

By the time you swear you’re his,
Shivering and sighing,
And he vows his passion is
Infinite, undying -
Lady, make a note of this:
One of you is lying.

In yet another poem:

Oh, seek, my love, your newer way;
I’ll not be left in sorrow.
So long as I have yesterday,
Go take your damned to-morrow!

The poems are cynical, many of them, but they are not depressingly melancholic. The simple, humor-infused, effortless rhyme make the poems light-hearted, and moments both of love and loss are dealt with in jest. Enough Rope is the first collection of 6 others in the book of her collected poems. I may have more to say when I get on to finishing the rest.

The book is about war – and the war is over a woman, Helen. Now imagine your are a soldier in the midst of a war between the Greeks and the Trojans. It doesn’t matter what side you are on – your survival depends on whether you have been beget by a God (often, Zeus), or have the special protection (aegis, if you will) of one of those in the pantheon of Greek gods, who will run to your rescue and cover you in a storm of dust or steal you away from the midst of battle at your weakest, most susceptible moment. If you cannot boast of either of the above, then you are likely to be sent to Hades, which is ancient Greek euphemism for – you are f***ed!. You could try bribing a god or two with a hecatomb, and if they are pleased, they will let you breathe a while longer.

I am just about half-way through the book. The battle is still raging on – the Trojans seem like they have an upper-hand, while Achilles and his Myrmidons are twiddling their thumbs and watching the battle but refuse to help the Greeks because the Greek/Argive king Agamemnon took for himself the woman (Briseis) originally won Achilles at the end of the previous pillaging operation. Evidently, the easiest way to piss off a greek warrior is to take away his woman. The gods seem to watch the battle with interest from the comfort of Mt. Olympus; the battle is like reality TV for them, except there is no TV, and ever so often they feel the need to run up to the stage and interfere.

The Iliad reminds us of an earlier, simpler time when having your wife run away with another could be reason enough to wage a long bloody war; when the worth of a warrior was based not on the number of FB friends they possessed, rather on the number of horses and cattle and the soldiers and slaves they commanded. But that shouldn’t stop you from pausing in the middle of battle to remind your assailer that his grandpa and your grandpa were best friends, and ask him if he is willing to make franship with you (in classic Greek, so it sounds mythically sincere). If he is cool with that, he will smile and give you a hug; if he is not, he will send you to Hades, and then smile. You really don’t want to go to Hades.

My goal is to finish the book before the next greek myth movie, Immortals is released. If it interests you, the film has Freida Pinto playing a beautiful Greek woman of unknown heritage dispensing cliche-like wisdom. Imagine that.

age is no crime

but the shame
of a deliberately
wasted
life

among so many
deliberately
wasted
lives

is.

8 count was the poem that led me to look up more by Charles Bukowski. Now I have besides me, a 400-page tome of his poems – The Last Night of the Earth – page after page of his distinctive unadorned, indifferent, and melancholic style.

being perishable sometimes makes a
man
strange
almost
unemployable.

• If the person besides you at a social event demonstrates signs of throat irritation, cold, or cough, be very concerned. If the said person talks about a viral infection that’s going around the workplace, its probably too late. Don’t just stand there and nod. Get away. Grimacing and running away may not be entirely inappropriate.
• If you are still standing there trying to engage in polite conversation, welcome to a week or more of realizing how an invisible virus can bring you to a state of complete and miserable helplessness. It is, strangely enough, a very humbling experience.
• The thing with the flu is that it comes in stages. Stage 1 is that of confusion: are these really symptoms? Stage 2 is brutal self-realization. Stage 3 is confusion, again – where you begin to feel you are recovering, but you are just less worse off than the day before. Stage 4 is when the virus demonstrate some more tricks to mess with you - unexpected headaches, on-and-off chills. Stage 5 is when you are well enough to write about your misery.
• If you have the flu, you are a threat to society. Avoid anyone that’s not wearing a white coat. Lock yourself up, watch TV, count sheep if you like. But keep away from meeting others, and under no circumstance oblige another with the prospect of face-to-face conversation.
• If an illness does one thing well, it is to make you feel very homesick.

We look before and after,
And pine for what is not:
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught;
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.

from To a Skylark by Shelley

We are a social species. We once hunted in groups. It was an important survival instinct – this need to be a part of a group. Those that did not have the instinct, perhaps kept alone and ended up as lion feed. The genes for more social interaction survived. Being in groups led to a need to communicate, which may have led to language, and we could no longer not talk. Farming happened; no more did we have to head out to gang up on unsuspecting animals. We had more time to chit-chat. And scribble.

We were thinking then, just as we are now. We wanted others to know what we were thinking. Since others cared about what we were thinking, if we cared about what they were thinking, we had to ask others about their thoughts. Now, as most people will acknowledge, it is hard to think great thoughts all the time. We have our moments of sporadic genius and we have our moments of, shall we say, mental flaccidity, and that’s completely normal in case you had your doubts. Yet responding to talk with silence makes it somewhat suspect, even embarrassing; akin to refusing to shake an outstretched hand. You cannot not respond even when you cannot think; your social genes won’t let you. Since our mental up-times and down-times are not synced up perfectly, we have to come up with something – the weather, the neighbor’s dog, the most recent meal, nasal hair – anything to fill in the void, vocalized observations that completely bypass the grey matter between your ears.

Despite these social compulsions, there was hope. You could on occasions avoid interaction; make up a head-ache, or better still, a cold, where your refusal to show-up could be justified by a desire to avoid spreading the virus, earning social brownie points in the process. (If you have friends that report sick every time you call them, that’s a sign that you need to make new ones, or change yourself whichever is easier). Social equilibrium was possible.

Until FB-ing, blogging, tweeting, and other forms of me-meing came about. By the time one grasped what was happening, the levees had collapsed, and prosaic waters of daily ordinariness filled up our feed-list from every which way.There was no escape. We had to be in the loop; we were driven by the social need of our fore-bearers, coded up in our genes. Unless you abandoned the network, suffocated your desire to keep up with others, and yanked yourself free from those virtual bonds that attach you to your online friend list. It was a tough choice; some made it, and survived to tell the tale. But no one was there to listen, for now you had no followers. Most calls go to voice mail anyway. Doors remained unanswered, for your friends are out on vacation or at the local restaurant enjoying delicious Eritrean fare, or playing Farmville – if only there were a news feed to inform you, even a tweet. That there are multiple mediums of communication is a farce. There is only the online one, and it has spell-check.

‘What’s on your mind?’, asks the FB status update box. More often than not I find myself logged in to FB precisely when there is nothing on my mind. Except today. Or maybe even today.

He had come to understand the defining human struggle not as left versus right, or faith versus reason, but as individual versus institution. As a student of Kafka, Koestler, and Solzhenitsyn, he believed that truth, creativity, love, and compassion are corrupted by institutional hierarchies, and by “patronage networks”—one of his favorite expressions—that contort the human spirit …Assange wrote that illegitimate governance was by definition conspiratorial—the product of functionaries in “collaborative secrecy, working to the detriment of a population.” He argued that, when a regime’s lines of internal communication are disrupted, the information flow among conspirators must dwindle, and that, as the flow approaches zero, the conspiracy dissolves. Leaks were an instrument of information warfare.

Julian Assange, profiled in the New Yorker by Raffi Khatchadourian back in June 2010.