Book review - The Lowland

A simple story. A few characters. Their growth over the years. This is what can sum up Jhumpa Lahiri's latest work. No surprise elements. Nothing really earth shattering. Ordinary people with some uncommon situations in their lives, some uncommon ways of reacting to those situations in their lives. This could be another summary.

Doesn't sound like much of a novel. But the way it grips your imagination is a proof of the sublimity of Lahiri's story-telling ability. The ability to weave stories about people around you, of someone who easily could have been you, is an art that this lady as mastered.

She takes you through the lanes of Calcutta to the marshes and beaches of Rhode Island with bits of California interspersed in between. Then back to Kolkata. All effortlessly. All as if you are actually present there all along. Powerful pictures painted by mere words. The details of a life uprooted from India and replanted in America. The feelings, the vantage, of a life begot in America, visiting India briefly. The nuances of oceanography, philosophy, the Naxalite movement of the '70s and even agriculture, all there for you to relish. Served within the story, intermixed as herbs in a savory delicacy.

With the same simplicity you get to meet and know Subhash, Udayan, their parents, Gauri, Bela, and Meghna - the Mitra family. Reading about their behavior, their individual traits and personalities, you get to understand them. In fact, you even begin to predict what they would think and do next. More often than not, they do end up doing your bidding.

In my teenage, which for some reason seems a lifetime ago, i would have panned the book for this same reason. Too predictable.

But now, i really appreciate it. Maybe now i am learning to understand the true value of human relationships, the true value of predictability. And savoring the joy of things turning out exactly the way you wanted them to be.

Toastmaster's Advanced Speech 13 - "Experience At PSK"

This is speech #1 from "Specialty Speeches" manual, called "Impromptu Speaking". Five general topics have to be written on slips of paper with which one is familiar. These are to be given to the speech evaluator before the meeting. He or she will select one at random for the speaker. The objectives are to develop an awareness of situations in which one might be called upon to deliver an impromptu speech, to understand how to prepare for impromptu speaking and to use one or more patterns to approach a topic under discussion; for example, comparing a past, present and future situation or before and after . Time allotted is 5 to 7 minutes.

For this speech, i had selected five general topics:

1. Book review
2. Movie reviews
3. Recent Experience
4. Superwoman Syndrome
5. Any other topic on which the audience would like me to speak

 and the audience chose this one for me -

Passport Renewal Experience 


The speech took 10  minutes fro delivery. I felt i have done much better before...both in prepared as well as impromptus.

Book review - Doctor Zhivago

 Where do I begin? How does one go about reviewing such a tome of a work? Genre, you might say. Tell us about the genre. Is it fiction? Or historical fiction? Is it based on true events? Is it a biography of a real person? Well, it is all of them and none of them. Yet, as the tagline states, its the greatest love story ever told.

The story takes us through the life of Dr. Yuri Zhivago, a fictitious character who might have been any educated bourgeois (suited for a so-called white collared job, if such a thing existed in Russia back then) or the author himself.  Born at the turn of the 19^th century, Yuri is a firsthand witness to the Russian revolution of 1905, the October revolution of 1917 and the Civil War thereafter: arguably the most tumultuous time in the history of Russia. A period that also saw a war with Japan, the fall of the Tsars, the rise of the peasants and soldiers, a world war, and experimentation with forms of government – with  general chaos, dissent, atrocities, and complete upheaval of society in the country. 

Yurochka, unfortunately, is born to a wealthy merchant father who abandons him, and is left an orphan at an early age. Adopted by another wealthy household, the Gromyko’s, he studies medicine and marries Tonya Gromyko. Immensely thoughtful and artistically inclined, Yuri is also a poet and a philosopher who often does not think twice before speaking his mind - a quality that lands him in the soup many times. Living in Moscow, he first starts practicing medicine, but then serves as a military doctor in war.  Afterwards, the family relocates to Yuryatin where Tonya’s maternal grandfather was once a steel magnate.  Here, due to lack of any other means of sustenance, the family is forced to do farming to survive. Occupied in physical labor during all summer time, Yuri finds time to write his musings only during winter.

He is then abducted by a revolutionary group, The Forest Brotherhood, to tend to their sick and wounded, and reluctantly ends up being the leader’s confidant. During all these years and in his various journeys from place to place, Zhivago encounters the married yet single mother Lara Antipova every now and then, and eventually falls madly in love with her. So much so that on escaping from the Brotherhood, he first goes to Lara before taking stock of his own family. The story ends with Yuri’s death and a heart rending epilogue thereafter.

While there is no doubt about the genius and depth of the novel and the priceless glimpse it offers in the history of early 20^th century Russia, it does have its shortcomings. The first and foremost that struck me was the complexity of names of the characters and the myriad relationships they have with each other. Then there are a lot of coincidences and the same characters keep propping up from time to time in various different settings. Though we can attribute this to artistic freedom, at times it makes the reader realize that it is a fictional account after all, and tends to undermine the credibility of the novel’s epic nature.

With all that said, Dr. Zhivago is unquestionably the greatest historical fiction I have come across till date. Initially this book was not allowed to be published in its native Russia. The content was deemed inappropriate by the Communist party since it presented the alternate and ugly face of the revolution. The manuscript had to be smuggled out of the country and found the light of day in Italy in the year 1957. The powerful narrative, and the fact that such few works of art (or even news) came out from Russia during that time, won Boris Pasternak the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1958. The Russian government prohibited the author from accepting the prize and he was threatened with arrest and torture. Pasternak bowed to this pressure and refused to accept the award. Though this avoided his arrest, but it was not enough to thwart the threat of his expatriation to the West. It is said that the Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru (himself an author and connoisseur of art) then intervened to save the patriot Pasternak from exile.

This is the only novel Boris Pasternak ever got published in his lifetime. It was only in 1988 that his son was allowed to travel to Sweden and collect the Nobel on his late father’s behalf.

The Equality of Democracy - An experience at a PSK

A country of a billion people. A democracy that baffles with its diversity. Everywhere you go, you can get a glimpse of this difference. A difference that exists sometimes subtlely, sometimes right there staring at you in your face.

One such glimpse stared at me one day at the passport office. People from all walks of life, no matter what socio-economic-cultural-ethnic background they come from, get merged here, in a sea of passport applications. Nowhere else is the power of the state more visible than here. Maybe a police station would be another such place. But that is another topic. 

Power, concentrated in raw form, in the hands of a few people. In their hands the power of substantiating you as a passport worthy citizen. The bourgeois and the ordinary vying for their attention, a few minutes of their time. Equally. The aspirational ordinary looking at the better dressed thinking the world is for people like these. They get to go places. The well heeled thinking this is no place for themselves, standing in a queue waiting for their turn, thinking the world is for the masses.

Classes and masses. Classes cursing in English, masses in Hindi - both under their breath of course. No one wants The Government to hear their thoughts (Government being the people at the other side of the counter). The smell in the office a mixture of perfumes, deodorants and sweat. More sweat than deodorant. More Hindi than English. More casuals than formals. More with families than alone. More young than old. Rules the same, roof the same. Discipline - or lack thereof - the same. 

As a lone woman standing in one of such queues, I think where do I belong? Who do I sympathize with? And my turn comes.

I lay my life bare in front of His Almighty. In all original documents. He opens my old passport, looks at the photo and says, is this really your passport? I am shell-shocked. If the Almighty decides it’s not me in person, who would validate my identity? I manage to blabber out that it has been ten years….Sir (I almost said Prabhu at this point but checked myself in time. Yes Prabhu, I cut my hair short, stopped wearing glasses and have aged. Spite me).

I begin to think maybe the Almighty is a bit chauvinistic. His boss comes to my rescue then and does the needful. I thank my stars. The Government poses a second question: your husband’s and your surnames are different? I say yes; I didn’t change mine after marriage. In my head I say, is that a crime? Definitely a chauvinist. The third question proves it. Address change. Where is your wife/of address proof? I go….huh…what does that even mean? Stumped.

Turns out, daughter/of address proof doesn’t work after marriage. I wonder if son/of still does? I take a 180 degree turn then and don’t look back, fearing the Almighty might decide to call in security to throw an aberration out.

I take a look around. Feel people’s eyes on me. The well-heeled and the not-so-chic, the smelly and the scented, the Hindi-type and the English-type. Everyone is looking at me. And suddenly it dawns. I don’t belong. Masses, classes, anywhere.

To hell with them all I think. I shall come back. Maybe with no proof of having married? Then maybe the surname and daughter/of address proof would be acceptable? To The Government, that is.

Coming back to equality. Well, we’ll get there. Someday.

P.S. I did get my passport renewed in spite of everything - surname, appearance - in my second visit. Apparently, a joint bank account statement suffices as the ‘wife/of’ address proof, which The Government aptly forgot to tell me the other day. Google to the rescue! After all, it is the new savior now (till the day it turns the way all All-Mighties are supposed to turn: sour).

P.P.S. In case your are wondering what a PSK means...it stands for Passport Seva Kendra.

Toastmaster's Advanced Speech 12 - "Big Data"

This is speech #1 from "Speaking to Inform" manual, called "Resources For Informing". The objectives are to analyze your audience regarding your chosen subject, focus your presentation at the audience's level of knowledge, build a supporting case for each major point using information gathered through research, and effectively use at least one visual aid to enhance the audience's understanding. Time allotted is 5 to 7 minutes.

Data. Big Data. Naam toh suna hoga?

Good Afternoon fellow Toastmasters. Seriously, there would be no one in the world of technology who hasn’t heard this name..unless of course one lives in a cave, in which case, most probably one doesn’t have  anything to do with technology at all. 

Jokes apart, Big Data is something that has baffled many of us at many times. But my friends, nothing could be simpler to understand. Unlike terms such as cloud computing -which has nothing to do with clouds or specifically with weather prediction, big data means exactly what the name suggests – big, huge, large, gigantic, humongous data. 

 

Imagine the amount of data that you yourself deal with everyday…..on your office laptop – work files, mails, archives, knowledge sharing docs..then on your home PC or tablet – pics, videos, music, movies…then the content you access online….or your data on the “cloud” – on social networking sites, content sharing websites, or even your email data or browsing history…..things that the apps on your smartphone remember for you – notes that send you an alarm across devices, ebooks that are in sync on any device you use, and on and on. Look at this image on the left…according to visualnews.com…every minute of the day, this is what users do on an average on the internet.

48 hours of new videos uploaded on you tube, over 204 million email messages, 2 million searches on google, 3600 photos on instagram, 47 thousand app downloads on the Apple Store…and this is just one minute. And there are 1440 minutes in a day. 365 days in an year. Imagine the amount of data.  A Zillion terabytes, isn’t it?

Don’t you think big is a small word to describe it? Now to organize, capture, and analyze all this data is such a Herculean task that our traditional data processing techniques - that I learnt in college ten years ago - fall short. There is a need of multiple high capacity parallel processors that might be running in a distributed environment. To support them, we need to have a new set of exceptional software techniques and technologies; these are also known as Big Data or sometimes Big Data Analytics. Examples of some software being used today are - Hadoop, MapReduce, Cassandra, Storm. MongoDB and many more.

To study big data, you should first understand its nature and attributes. There are various characteristics of Big Data..but the 4 Vs stand out – Volume, Variety, Velocity and Veracity. This infographic from IBM best describes the 4 Vs. 

Volume: Scale of data; we already saw a sample in previous slides. Variety: different forms of data – text, images, audio, video. Velocity: Analysis of Streaming Data – increasing speed with which the data is getting uploaded and has to be analyzed; and Veracity: Uncertainty of Data – whether the data is accurate and how to determine the accuracy.

Image Source: http://www.systems-thinking.org/dikw/dikw.htm

Now you all might say…ok…big data..means lots of data…with volume, variety, velocity, veracity. So What?? Well...to understand and decipher all these zillions of bytes of data, to uncover correlations that you didn’t know existed, and then to predict user behavior is what Analytics is all about. This can involve data mining, predictive analytics, forecasting, optimization, artificial intelligence and what not.

Eventually, after applying all these techniques, an answer would emerge as shown in this graph.

Data, when structured and correlated, becomes information; information, when interpreted and sifted for patterns, becomes knowledge; knowledge, with a little bit more understanding and correctedness, transcends to wisdom. With the application of this DIKW pyramid of information science, the future might just become a better, or wise place to live.

Like any scientific discovery, invention or innovation, it is up to us how to use this wisdom when we ultimately get there. Not just doing things right, but doing the right things.  Not just the what, how and why of things, but doing what is best for the greater good.

 

Image Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:DIKW.png

Sources:

http://www.visualnews.com/2012/06/how-much-data-created-every-minute/

http://www.sas.com/en_us/insights/analytics/big-data-analytics.html

http://www.systems-thinking.org/dikw/dikw.htm

This speech took 8 minutes to deliver and was appreciated for the subject (the audience being an IT crowd), research and the visual aid : PPT.

School Diaries

White, Black, Brown fingers, 
Stained with the same blue ink; 
Light, Dark, Green, Grey eyes, 
Filled with the same curiosity blink. 

Singing morning prayers in one voice, 
Accents give away their nativeness; 
Mother tongue might be different, 
But what about Mom’s caress? 

First benchers, back benchers and those in between, 
Divided by grades or height they sit; 
But the peals of bells declaring the day, 
Generate the same bag-packing fit. 

Sakeena or Rahul, Jaspreet or David, 
Call out to different deities to bless; 
But the jump of joy is equal, 
When jalebi is served in the mess. 

Like colors of the rainbow, 
They shine in their unique ways; 
But with the moral fiber school inculcates, 
We hope the unifying radiance stays. 

Women must have it ALL

A speech for Area Level International Speech Contest. 

 

(Opening Scene. Running on a treadmill.Panting.)

2 km. 4 km. I need to do 10 km today. Yesterday I looked so fat in that dress! I should probably start pilates or yoga, join some class…but my gardening would suffer then…maybe I can steal some homework time for this..oh no no no..i can’t do that…it’s about my kid’s future after all…if that smug mrs do-it-all sharma’s son gets better grades, how am I going to face the mirror? Talking of mirrors, the one in the bedroom needs some shining…let me meet the maid today..i’ll show her how cleaning is supposed to be done! For that matter, cooking as well. Oh..what time is it….gosh!

(Stop Panting) Mr. Contest master, fellow toastmasters and whoever has run on the spot without getting anywhere…good morning..rise and shine and glimpse into the world of a superwoman… the all powerful, omnipresent, <speaking very fast> always fresh, always ready, always there for you, never late, never wrong, the best daughter, the best sister, the best friend, the best wife, the best mother, the best employee, the best project manager <stop speaking very fast, deep breath>..….your own fine superwoman…..miss perfect. What? Did you say nobody is perfect?

Well....i am nobody. And everybody. Unique…one and only…just like everyone else! Or, am i? Pause for effect.

Funny how things happen and wake you up when you are least expecting them to…me and my husband went to our friends’ place a few days back. They had the most beautifully kept house..spic and span…the tiles were so clean you could bend over and check if your lipstick’s still good! The bathrooms so spruced up and redolent, you’d almost end up apologizing to the toilet seat after relieving yourself. <pause for audience laughter> Naturally, my competitive instinct told me to look down upon myself and berate me for being a lax homemaker..what kind of a woman was I if my floor tiles were simply clean..and not reflective..or if the bathroom smelled just good, and not aromatic? 

Oh..the shame of it! Like other things of prime importance in my world, I ended up discussing this with my husband. “Did you see the kitchen? The cook top was virginal….as if nothing was ever prepared on it! The lady of the house must have a magic wand.” The answer he gave me was an eye opener, “Oh yeah…the sorcerer! Her amazing housekeeping skills automatically make her the best person that ever existed, isn’t it? And by corollary, it makes you the worst…because you live in a digital world..either 1..or 0.”

Well….even if he was saying this just for me to stop nagging him about his shoes lying here and there, he did have a point. What have we done to ourselves? The double whammy of guilt laden with consumerism has led to ever increasing expectations, and we are now slaves to it. We’ve gone beyond mere obsessive-compulsiveness and landed into the realm of ‘the superwoman complex’. The idea that one can do everything…and why can….one has to do everything. Phrases like just a housewife, just a mother, just a career woman….hurt us….we feel dishonored by them.

With decades and centuries of crusading for women’s rights…right from a suffragette in the 20^th century to the neo-feminists of the day…what is everyone fighting for if the object of the movement – woman - is its worst adversary! What we really need, first and foremost, is freedom from this superwoman cape. This garment of incessant unnecessary burdens that we ourselves have proudly adorned ourselves with. Who said looking fat is disgraceful…do yoga if you feel like..who said gardening is essential…if it is, hire a gardener. Who said the poor mirror will disown you if mrs. Sharma’s son excels in his studies! Take it easy ladies! Lets try being happy with good…or just ok. Sheryl Sandberg says “Lean In!”, Indira Nooyi say “Women can’t have it all”….Melissa Mayer has some radically different ideas. And us ordinary women think we must have it all. Well, if you do want to have it all, let it be A Little Leisure. (make a, L, L symbols with fingers as you say it.)

This ended up being a runner-up speech that day.