The Thoughtworks Anthology provides a peek into a diverse set of topics, views and perspectives held by some of the Thoughtworks firm members. The book consists of thirteen insightful essays on modern software development practices, most of them challenging some long held views. The book is aimed at several different audiences right from Project Managers to Business Analysts to Developers to Testers. There is no single central idea to the book, and all the thirteen essays touch a wide range of topics. Not having technical expertise in some of the topics hampered my understanding and I skipped those; I wouldn’t comment much on them in this review. The quality of the different essays varies widely but in a word, for anybody in the software industry: Recommended
Various Chapter Highlights:
1) Solving the Business Software “Last Mile” – by Roy Singham, Founder and Chairman, and Michael Robinson, Technology Principal.
While newer processes like Agile, SCRUM and TDD have allowed us to deliver high-quality software quickly, it still hasn’t helped us resolve the problem of “the last mile”. In the author’s words “This “last mile” is the part of the process that happens after the software satisfies the functional requirements but before the software goes into production and starts to deliver value to the business”. This essay was easily my best pick in the entire group of essays, and was worth the entire book alone. How many projects that we have worked in go “live” as quickly as it is produced?
2) One Lair and Twenty Ruby DSLs – by Martin Fowler, Chief Scientist
3) The Lush Landscape of Languages – by Rebecca J. Parsons, CTO
Nothing too new. If you need to refresh your memory about the difference between various programming language, then read through this essay.
4) Polyglot Programming – by Neal Ford
The author in this essay start off by explaining what polygot programming is by saying "The word polyglot means speaking many languages. Polyglot programming leverages the separation of language and platform in Java (and in C# as well), allowing developers to use specialized languages to solve specific problems. We now have hundreds of languages that run on the Java virtual machine and the .NET managed runtime. Yet, as developers, we don’t leverage this capability enough.". In the next few sections, they show us some examples of applying polygot programming. Didn’t understand much.
5) Object Calisthenics – by Jeff Bay, Technology Principal
A really thought provoking essay. While we all code in our day-to-day lives, the author suggests nine rules to code, which could make programming easier to understand and large project code respositories easier to handle:
i. Use only one level of indentation per method
ii. Don’t use the else keyword
iii. Wrap all primitives and strings
iv. Use only one dot per line
v. Don’t abbreviate
vi. Keep all entities small
vii. Don’t use any classes with more than two instance variables
viii. Use first-class collections
ix. Don’t use any getters/setters/properties.
6) What is an Iteration Manager anyways? – by Tiffany Lentz, Project Manager
This essay provided some new insights into the role of the SCRUM Masters and Iteration Managers as opposed to the traditional Project Managers. It talks about the roles and responsibilities and restrictions with an IM. While many people believe that the IM is just a weaker version of the Project Manager, this essay explains how this is not true, and how the two roles are quite independent in their job profiles
7) Project Vital Signs – by Stelios Pantazopoulos, Iteration Manager
If you are reviewing a project, in the middle of, say, the 10th iteration, when the project is a 20 iteration project, how do you gauge the “health” of the project? The author here comes up with some quantitative metrics, called Project Vital Signs, which help an outsider identify the “health” of the project:
i. Scope burn-up: The state of scope delivery for a deadline
ii. Delivery quality: The state of the end product being delivered
iii. Budget burn-down: The state of the budget in terms of scope delivery
iv. Current state of implementation: The real-time state of the system delivery
v. Team perceptions: The team perspective on the state of the project (Personally, my favorite...something new)
8) Consumer-Driven Contracts: A Service Evolution Pattern – by Ian Robinson, Architect
Do your SOA from the consumer side not the provider side, excellent idea.
9) Domain Annotations – by Erik Doernenburg, Technology Principal
This essay advocates the use of domain-driven design, which follows the idea that during development, the primary focus should be on the domain and the domain logic. Should be very interesting for those into domain-driven design
10) Refactoring Ant Build Files – by Julian Simpson, Build Architect
11) Single-Click Software Release – by Dave Farley, Technology Principal
If you are planning on building an end-to-end continuous integration release systems that will deploy large, complex applications to whichever environment we choose at the click of a button, then this is the chapter you need to read. The essay had some good points for the deployment process
12) Agile vs. Waterfall Testing for Enterprise Web Apps – by Kristan Vingrys, QA Consultant
This essay gives a good overview of the testing life cycle, the different types of testing, and testing environments. The first few sections narrating this should help refresh the testing news and views that are well known. The author then covers topics such as issue management, the tools you need to use for testing purposes, reports and metrics. The essay is concluded with discussing the testing roles for different members.
13) Pragmatic Performance Testing – by James Bull, QA Consultant
This essay gives us an insight about what performance testing is, and gives detailed explanation about the four key elements: requirements, product performance data, communication, and process. The author concludes this essay by explaining how to link all these together, how not to drop behind, and finally how to bring an issue resolution process to close. Again, nothing new, something we have been hearing for long, but do not imbibe quite frequently in our day-to-day proceedings.
Altogether, some really good essays, some just fillers, but overall the book is quite relevant, timely and definitely recommended.
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Thursday, January 22, 2009
Book Review: The Omnivore's Dilemma - A Natural History of Four Meals
A fab new addition to my list of interesting-reads, 'The Omnivore's Dilemma'-- a gift to me by a colleague, who is quite a foodie just as I am -- is a book about food. To elaborate, not just "about food", in fact it's all about food and about all food. Not just cooking and eating food, but it's also about the production, evolution, industrialization, emotion, environmentalization, consumption, digestion, and philosophization of food. While it is primarily a scathing look into all that's wrong with the food industry in the US of A, it's a good read for anyone who wants to nip the fowl in the bud, if the food industrialization crisis is just about hitting their country. What Michael Pollan, the author, set out to do was to describe the creation of 4 different meals. This would take him to farms, feedlots, grocery convenience stores, forests, and hidden mushroom gathering sites all over the Americas, while discussing the social, political, ecological, and economical aspects of the food chain. Following were the four meals that he focussed his writing on:
1) Industrial - A fast food meal dinner brought at a McDonald's drive-through and consumed in the car itself
2) Industrial Organic - Organic food bought at a local Whole Foods, and cooked at home with other organic produce
3) Local - A farmer’s market meal from Virginia’s Polyface farm, cooked at home with other local produce (things produced and consumed within a defined geographic boundary)
4) Hunter-Gatherer - A meal for which Pollan hunts the meat and gathers the mushrooms himself
While 'The Omnivore's Dilemma' is by no means an iconic book, or even quite a literary achievement, I would still deem it as a must-read for all. Absolutely essential, especially for Americans, and Indians who are fast driving into the fast-food lane. With increasing nuclearization of our traditional Indian joint family system, we are coming to depend more-and-more on McDonald's and KFC for our daily bread and more. With this book, Pollan aims to throw more light on all that's wrong with the lifestyle of comfort that we are choosing for ourselves. While food in India has still not reached as much a state of remote-control as it has in the USA, it is interesting to read how we are falling preys to the consumerization of food and in turn harming our own lives, and the world as a whole.
How did we reach this situation?
Where to begin from? Maybe from corn (Meal #1 starts with the evolution of corn), starting from how the American government subsidizes the corn industry at the expense of the land and, most disturbingly, the health of its people; to how scientists at places like McDonald’s conspire to turn corn-—which is outrageously cheap and plentiful-—into millions of different products, from Chicken McNuggets to the stabilizer in the dressings you put on your “healthy” salad, not to mention the zillions of chemicals derived from corn—-from HFCS (high fructose corn stabilizers) to xantham gum to edible essences.
The cornification of our body and lands is an important issue, yes. The bigger issue, though, is the treatment meted out to the poor animals that go into making our fast food -- the tortured, diseased animals whose miserable lives are rendered into that flavorless disc called the tikki or the patty. That meat comes from a cow that’s fed an unnatural diet of the plentiful and really cheap corn, as opposed to its biological and evolutionary propensity for grass. This change in its eating pattern leads it to break out in numerous diseases while crammed mercilessly into lots, standing in piles of their own shit. Which again means numerous antibiotics that go into their feed to prevent them from falling ill and falling into a "depression" which might trigger them into riots. As one could expect, there aren't many positive sides to the industrial meal, the production and consumption of which is a waste of money and energy, topped with disgraceful animal living conditions, exploitation of labor, absurd government subsidy structures, and vast ecological damages leading even to global warming.
However gruesome the scene that Pollan tries to portray with beef and pork, he doesn't try to push for a vegetarian agenda. Human beings are actually animals with a carnivorous evolutionary pattern, and hence it is but natural for mankind to be eating meat. The fact is that with the discovery of agriculture, mankind found an easy access to a vegetarian diet, and hence turned omnivorous. It’s only a new phenomenon that with the industrialization of agriculture and animal farming, we are getting into a harmful pattern of producing and consuming food.
Meal #2 wasn't exactly a remarkable read, except for some pertinent issues raised by Pollan. For example, is it better to eat a "conventional" apple from a farm down the road, or an organic one flown in from New Zealand? And just what is "organic," or "free range"? And does all "organic" food actually mean good?
For meal # 3, Pollan spent a week working on Polyface Farm, a self contained grass farm run by a man named Joe Salatin that raises cows, chickens, pigs, turkeys, rabbits, etc. Salatin describes himself as a "grass farmer", the ideology behind it being that the grass sustains most of the living beings in his farm, starting from the ruminating cows to his customers who end up buying the commodities from his farm. The idea is that instead of importing nutrients in the form of chemical fertilizers, Salatin uses a very well planned and intricate system of animal rotation to raise everything using only his own forest and pasture land. According to Salatin, grass grows better if it is nibbled on (but not overgrazed), and with this system Salatin has turned an overgrazed wasteland of a farm into a very efficient and productive plot of pasture and forest. So the cows graze on one part of the land just right, and then he moves the cows to another part. They are followed by the chicken who nibble on the cow dung, to take out its nutrients and spread the grass seeds further; which are then followed by the rabbits and the pigs in a very systematic and proven dance. What it results it is in eggs with the most carrotish orange egg yolks, and thick muscle bound whites, and farm produce with not even the slightest bit of artificially produced fertilizers or pesticides. This was my most interesting portion of the book, and I would recommend this book to all just to go through this particular section. At the end of one particular cycle, when Salatin begins selling his produce at the local market, people come driving all the way from about 50 miles afar to buy things from him. This is what Pollan stresses as "putting a face" to your farm; trying and learning more about where your food comes from. Sample this writing: "But imagine for a moment if we once again knew, strictly as a manner of course, these few unremarkable things: What it is we're eating. Where it came from. How it found its way to our table. And what, in a true accounting, it really cost. We could then talk about some other things at dinner. For we would no longer need any reminding that however we chose to feed ourselves, we eat by the grace of nature, not industry, and what we're eating is never anything more or less than the body of the world"
The final meal was about as close as one could come to the whole hunter-gatherer model. Pollan hunted mushrooms, wild pigs, and random greens and fruits to make a dinner focused on things that he "found" himself. This was quite an easy read, and again raised some pertinent questions.
There are so many more interesting points that were highlighted in this book, that, if nothing, I at least came out enlightened by the reading of this book. And hence I would recommend this book as a very essential read for everyone. If you want to live healthy and eat good, start with eating what's right - for yourself and for the environment. As for the money part of eating right, let me defend it with Pollan's argument "Americans today spend less on food, as a percentage of disposable income, than any other industrialized nation, and probably less than any people in the history of the world. This suggests that there are many of us who could afford to spend more on food if we chose to. After all, it isn't only the elite who in recent years have found an extra fifty or one hundred dollars each month to spend on cell phones (now owned by more than half the U.S. population, children included) or television, which close to 90 percent of all U.S. households now pay for. Another formerly free good that more than half of us happily pay for today is water. So is the unwillingness to pay more for food really a matter of affordability or priority?"
1) Industrial - A fast food meal dinner brought at a McDonald's drive-through and consumed in the car itself
2) Industrial Organic - Organic food bought at a local Whole Foods, and cooked at home with other organic produce
3) Local - A farmer’s market meal from Virginia’s Polyface farm, cooked at home with other local produce (things produced and consumed within a defined geographic boundary)
4) Hunter-Gatherer - A meal for which Pollan hunts the meat and gathers the mushrooms himself
While 'The Omnivore's Dilemma' is by no means an iconic book, or even quite a literary achievement, I would still deem it as a must-read for all. Absolutely essential, especially for Americans, and Indians who are fast driving into the fast-food lane. With increasing nuclearization of our traditional Indian joint family system, we are coming to depend more-and-more on McDonald's and KFC for our daily bread and more. With this book, Pollan aims to throw more light on all that's wrong with the lifestyle of comfort that we are choosing for ourselves. While food in India has still not reached as much a state of remote-control as it has in the USA, it is interesting to read how we are falling preys to the consumerization of food and in turn harming our own lives, and the world as a whole.
How did we reach this situation?
Where to begin from? Maybe from corn (Meal #1 starts with the evolution of corn), starting from how the American government subsidizes the corn industry at the expense of the land and, most disturbingly, the health of its people; to how scientists at places like McDonald’s conspire to turn corn-—which is outrageously cheap and plentiful-—into millions of different products, from Chicken McNuggets to the stabilizer in the dressings you put on your “healthy” salad, not to mention the zillions of chemicals derived from corn—-from HFCS (high fructose corn stabilizers) to xantham gum to edible essences.
The cornification of our body and lands is an important issue, yes. The bigger issue, though, is the treatment meted out to the poor animals that go into making our fast food -- the tortured, diseased animals whose miserable lives are rendered into that flavorless disc called the tikki or the patty. That meat comes from a cow that’s fed an unnatural diet of the plentiful and really cheap corn, as opposed to its biological and evolutionary propensity for grass. This change in its eating pattern leads it to break out in numerous diseases while crammed mercilessly into lots, standing in piles of their own shit. Which again means numerous antibiotics that go into their feed to prevent them from falling ill and falling into a "depression" which might trigger them into riots. As one could expect, there aren't many positive sides to the industrial meal, the production and consumption of which is a waste of money and energy, topped with disgraceful animal living conditions, exploitation of labor, absurd government subsidy structures, and vast ecological damages leading even to global warming.
However gruesome the scene that Pollan tries to portray with beef and pork, he doesn't try to push for a vegetarian agenda. Human beings are actually animals with a carnivorous evolutionary pattern, and hence it is but natural for mankind to be eating meat. The fact is that with the discovery of agriculture, mankind found an easy access to a vegetarian diet, and hence turned omnivorous. It’s only a new phenomenon that with the industrialization of agriculture and animal farming, we are getting into a harmful pattern of producing and consuming food.
Meal #2 wasn't exactly a remarkable read, except for some pertinent issues raised by Pollan. For example, is it better to eat a "conventional" apple from a farm down the road, or an organic one flown in from New Zealand? And just what is "organic," or "free range"? And does all "organic" food actually mean good?
For meal # 3, Pollan spent a week working on Polyface Farm, a self contained grass farm run by a man named Joe Salatin that raises cows, chickens, pigs, turkeys, rabbits, etc. Salatin describes himself as a "grass farmer", the ideology behind it being that the grass sustains most of the living beings in his farm, starting from the ruminating cows to his customers who end up buying the commodities from his farm. The idea is that instead of importing nutrients in the form of chemical fertilizers, Salatin uses a very well planned and intricate system of animal rotation to raise everything using only his own forest and pasture land. According to Salatin, grass grows better if it is nibbled on (but not overgrazed), and with this system Salatin has turned an overgrazed wasteland of a farm into a very efficient and productive plot of pasture and forest. So the cows graze on one part of the land just right, and then he moves the cows to another part. They are followed by the chicken who nibble on the cow dung, to take out its nutrients and spread the grass seeds further; which are then followed by the rabbits and the pigs in a very systematic and proven dance. What it results it is in eggs with the most carrotish orange egg yolks, and thick muscle bound whites, and farm produce with not even the slightest bit of artificially produced fertilizers or pesticides. This was my most interesting portion of the book, and I would recommend this book to all just to go through this particular section. At the end of one particular cycle, when Salatin begins selling his produce at the local market, people come driving all the way from about 50 miles afar to buy things from him. This is what Pollan stresses as "putting a face" to your farm; trying and learning more about where your food comes from. Sample this writing: "But imagine for a moment if we once again knew, strictly as a manner of course, these few unremarkable things: What it is we're eating. Where it came from. How it found its way to our table. And what, in a true accounting, it really cost. We could then talk about some other things at dinner. For we would no longer need any reminding that however we chose to feed ourselves, we eat by the grace of nature, not industry, and what we're eating is never anything more or less than the body of the world"
The final meal was about as close as one could come to the whole hunter-gatherer model. Pollan hunted mushrooms, wild pigs, and random greens and fruits to make a dinner focused on things that he "found" himself. This was quite an easy read, and again raised some pertinent questions.
There are so many more interesting points that were highlighted in this book, that, if nothing, I at least came out enlightened by the reading of this book. And hence I would recommend this book as a very essential read for everyone. If you want to live healthy and eat good, start with eating what's right - for yourself and for the environment. As for the money part of eating right, let me defend it with Pollan's argument "Americans today spend less on food, as a percentage of disposable income, than any other industrialized nation, and probably less than any people in the history of the world. This suggests that there are many of us who could afford to spend more on food if we chose to. After all, it isn't only the elite who in recent years have found an extra fifty or one hundred dollars each month to spend on cell phones (now owned by more than half the U.S. population, children included) or television, which close to 90 percent of all U.S. households now pay for. Another formerly free good that more than half of us happily pay for today is water. So is the unwillingness to pay more for food really a matter of affordability or priority?"
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Book Review: Once Was Bombay
Captioned as a compelling portrayal of a dying city, the author Pinki Virani, in the back page summary of "Once was Bombay", lays her forthrightness on the line
"Who killed Bombay, once India's trend-setting city and commercial capital? its politicians or its underworld? When did this city of gold turn into a cemetery of dead souls and dreams?"
With lines like this, Pinki sounds like a nay-sayer denying Mumbai of its share of glory, and wanting me to distance myself from this book. Umpteen times before have different city dwellers compared today's Mumbai to the Bombay of yore. And while it's great to reflect on past days of glory, what is hugely overlooked that the modern ways of living, travelling, eating and enjoying are here to stay, so it would matter more if we think around what we can do to make our lives better given the existing framework.
Nevertheless, with an unsure mind I began reading the book. The preface started out with a scathing write up of how each one of us have made ourselves into an island neglecting the vast seas of the city surrounding us, all the time fattening ourselves and our purses and letting the city go into a rot. And while she does warn that like the island of Mauritius, the waters will definitely rise one day robbing us of everything that we have worked so hard to build, she also sets the tone that it is still not too late to turn back and save the city. After the 26/11 strikes on Mumbai a warning like this does sound sound enough. And with a heavy heart and reflections on how I have been neglecting the city all my living years here, I turned the page to further stories.
The book comprises of three novellas and four short stories, to be read as stand-alone or inter-linked pieces (the stories are interlinked in their themes, contexts and surprisingly they are even interlinked by a song "Goli Maar Bheje Mein, Dhichkyaon" from the RGV cult classic "Satya"). What's also interesting is that the book sings paeans to the honest officials in the Mumbai Police department, starting with Vijay Salaskar. If I had read this story before 26/11 probably I would not have known who Salaskar is, and it would not have made a deep imprint in my mind. But when Salaskar mentions about the perils of his thankless job, it strikes a chord somewhere in my mind. It's a sad and sorry tale that we learn to respect an individual's contribution to the society and world at large, only after his death.
Moving on, sadly the first chapter "Crime and Punishment" is probably the weakest link in the entire chain of stories. I had almost put the book aside after I read the story. There were too many thoughts muddled in a single paragraph and too many grammatical errors to ignore. It looked like when she started writing, she began writing with fire, and did not pause to rephrase and correct herself when the fire died down. Sample this. "The man shot is Vallabh Thakkar, known to appease all kinds of gangsters as long as he could continue putting up his buildings. Manish Shah is aware of this, so when Vallabh Thakkar suggests he develop a portion of land, Manish is hesitant." I found the mix of present and past tenses confusing. The story is about how real estate in Mumbai is controlled by the land mafia, and how it is out of bounds for the common man to get into real estate business. A respectable couple of friends who run a construction business make a brief foray into real estate development. But they are wound up in the web of deceit laid by the mafiadom in the form of squatters, thugs, killers and kidnappers. Almost immediately the two men are caught up in this web which ends tragically for one of them. Virani provides plentiful, fascinating background about the Bombay dons -- Arun Gawli, Chota Rajan, Dawood Ibrahim -- and their rise to power.
Thankfully, I survived my initial reaction and survived the remaining book, and how. I finished reading the remaining portion in a single sitting, it was THAT interesting. The second story, "Mazagon, Bombay-10" (Reminds me of how Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra, has used Dilli-6 as the title for his new movie which is based in Chandni Chowk, Delhi) is a gentle, rambling story, and autobiographical to a large extent. Pinki Virani grew up in Mazagon, in a Muslim family. Her father ran a glass and crockery shop in Bhendi Bazaar, and her mother's ancestors were originally Parsis who converted to Islam a few generations earlier. The story describes the history of Mazagon, the migration patterns of the Parsi community, the present scenario, the lives of the daughters and women-folk and the effect of the 92/93 riots on this largely Muslim area. This story alone compelled me to finish the rest of the book. Here is a brief excerpt from the story depicting how that part of the city got its name.
"Surfacing like Bombay's six other islands as a dense combination of fish shit and rotting palms, was Machcha grama or the village of fish, Matsyagram in Sanskrit. [It also began to be called] Maazghar, or the central portion of the house, or the centre of the seven islands [of Bombay]. The British anglicized it to Mazgon, the Prasis called it Mazagon, the Gujaratis and Ismailis named it Majgaum and the Marathis, Maazagaon, their village. When the natives left the predominantly British high-walled fort area to settle on the outskirts, in adjoining islands, the Christians built a little village within Mazagon for their parents, and they called it simply that, The Village; the rest of Mazagon referred to it as Mhatarpacady, the quarter of the elderlies"
"Salvage, Savage" which is another novella is also an interesting story. It's largely about Pakya, a thug who is moving up the ranks, and Chhagan Bujbal who she sees as the only honest politician around. The peeks into Pakya's life are irresistible -- his purple cellphone, his actress girlfriend, his background. Chhagan Bhujbal's tirade seemed very unconvincing and discontenting. But, Chhagan Bhujbal? Yeah right! And while she names every other politician by name, she does not name Bal, Raj or Uddhav Thackeray by name. Guess finally even she wanted to save her pretty face from being blackened.
The other stories "C'mon Barbie...", "...Let's go party" (she connects the stories with the titles too), "A Modern Morality tale", "The Lala in Winter" are all well written and provide very interesting tidbits about the city we live in. The book is classified as "a non fiction, rich in memories and insights", and sometimes it becomes difficult to point out how much is fiction and how much is true. But to be fair to Pinki, she has done a great deal of historical delving, to provide the reader as complete a picture as probably possible. The language of the book is a bit terse, especially when she writes in the tones of the localites (Bambaiyya Hindi, replete with names like Salim Sandaasiya), even the English is the local mix mash of English, Hindi and Marathi ('She would think like that only, na?'). The book is an absolute delight for anyone who has lived in Mumbai for a while, and are interested in the underbelly of the city.
"Who killed Bombay, once India's trend-setting city and commercial capital? its politicians or its underworld? When did this city of gold turn into a cemetery of dead souls and dreams?"
With lines like this, Pinki sounds like a nay-sayer denying Mumbai of its share of glory, and wanting me to distance myself from this book. Umpteen times before have different city dwellers compared today's Mumbai to the Bombay of yore. And while it's great to reflect on past days of glory, what is hugely overlooked that the modern ways of living, travelling, eating and enjoying are here to stay, so it would matter more if we think around what we can do to make our lives better given the existing framework.
Nevertheless, with an unsure mind I began reading the book. The preface started out with a scathing write up of how each one of us have made ourselves into an island neglecting the vast seas of the city surrounding us, all the time fattening ourselves and our purses and letting the city go into a rot. And while she does warn that like the island of Mauritius, the waters will definitely rise one day robbing us of everything that we have worked so hard to build, she also sets the tone that it is still not too late to turn back and save the city. After the 26/11 strikes on Mumbai a warning like this does sound sound enough. And with a heavy heart and reflections on how I have been neglecting the city all my living years here, I turned the page to further stories.
The book comprises of three novellas and four short stories, to be read as stand-alone or inter-linked pieces (the stories are interlinked in their themes, contexts and surprisingly they are even interlinked by a song "Goli Maar Bheje Mein, Dhichkyaon" from the RGV cult classic "Satya"). What's also interesting is that the book sings paeans to the honest officials in the Mumbai Police department, starting with Vijay Salaskar. If I had read this story before 26/11 probably I would not have known who Salaskar is, and it would not have made a deep imprint in my mind. But when Salaskar mentions about the perils of his thankless job, it strikes a chord somewhere in my mind. It's a sad and sorry tale that we learn to respect an individual's contribution to the society and world at large, only after his death.
Moving on, sadly the first chapter "Crime and Punishment" is probably the weakest link in the entire chain of stories. I had almost put the book aside after I read the story. There were too many thoughts muddled in a single paragraph and too many grammatical errors to ignore. It looked like when she started writing, she began writing with fire, and did not pause to rephrase and correct herself when the fire died down. Sample this. "The man shot is Vallabh Thakkar, known to appease all kinds of gangsters as long as he could continue putting up his buildings. Manish Shah is aware of this, so when Vallabh Thakkar suggests he develop a portion of land, Manish is hesitant." I found the mix of present and past tenses confusing. The story is about how real estate in Mumbai is controlled by the land mafia, and how it is out of bounds for the common man to get into real estate business. A respectable couple of friends who run a construction business make a brief foray into real estate development. But they are wound up in the web of deceit laid by the mafiadom in the form of squatters, thugs, killers and kidnappers. Almost immediately the two men are caught up in this web which ends tragically for one of them. Virani provides plentiful, fascinating background about the Bombay dons -- Arun Gawli, Chota Rajan, Dawood Ibrahim -- and their rise to power.
Thankfully, I survived my initial reaction and survived the remaining book, and how. I finished reading the remaining portion in a single sitting, it was THAT interesting. The second story, "Mazagon, Bombay-10" (Reminds me of how Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra, has used Dilli-6 as the title for his new movie which is based in Chandni Chowk, Delhi) is a gentle, rambling story, and autobiographical to a large extent. Pinki Virani grew up in Mazagon, in a Muslim family. Her father ran a glass and crockery shop in Bhendi Bazaar, and her mother's ancestors were originally Parsis who converted to Islam a few generations earlier. The story describes the history of Mazagon, the migration patterns of the Parsi community, the present scenario, the lives of the daughters and women-folk and the effect of the 92/93 riots on this largely Muslim area. This story alone compelled me to finish the rest of the book. Here is a brief excerpt from the story depicting how that part of the city got its name.
"Surfacing like Bombay's six other islands as a dense combination of fish shit and rotting palms, was Machcha grama or the village of fish, Matsyagram in Sanskrit. [It also began to be called] Maazghar, or the central portion of the house, or the centre of the seven islands [of Bombay]. The British anglicized it to Mazgon, the Prasis called it Mazagon, the Gujaratis and Ismailis named it Majgaum and the Marathis, Maazagaon, their village. When the natives left the predominantly British high-walled fort area to settle on the outskirts, in adjoining islands, the Christians built a little village within Mazagon for their parents, and they called it simply that, The Village; the rest of Mazagon referred to it as Mhatarpacady, the quarter of the elderlies"
"Salvage, Savage" which is another novella is also an interesting story. It's largely about Pakya, a thug who is moving up the ranks, and Chhagan Bujbal who she sees as the only honest politician around. The peeks into Pakya's life are irresistible -- his purple cellphone, his actress girlfriend, his background. Chhagan Bhujbal's tirade seemed very unconvincing and discontenting. But, Chhagan Bhujbal? Yeah right! And while she names every other politician by name, she does not name Bal, Raj or Uddhav Thackeray by name. Guess finally even she wanted to save her pretty face from being blackened.
The other stories "C'mon Barbie...", "...Let's go party" (she connects the stories with the titles too), "A Modern Morality tale", "The Lala in Winter" are all well written and provide very interesting tidbits about the city we live in. The book is classified as "a non fiction, rich in memories and insights", and sometimes it becomes difficult to point out how much is fiction and how much is true. But to be fair to Pinki, she has done a great deal of historical delving, to provide the reader as complete a picture as probably possible. The language of the book is a bit terse, especially when she writes in the tones of the localites (Bambaiyya Hindi, replete with names like Salim Sandaasiya), even the English is the local mix mash of English, Hindi and Marathi ('She would think like that only, na?'). The book is an absolute delight for anyone who has lived in Mumbai for a while, and are interested in the underbelly of the city.
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Book Review: The Red of His Shadow
'The Red Of His Shadow' is a brand new novel by Mayra Montero written in Spanish and translated into English by Edith Grossman. This is her fourth novel to be translated into English. Her previous works which have been translated into English (again by Edith Grossman) include In the Palm of Darkness, The Messenger & The Last Night I Spent With You. Cuban born Montero is one of biggest post-boom generation writers from Latin America. And all her works including this one are brilliant representations of the Latin American lifes of the poor and the downtrodden. Much like the poverty stricken streets of rural India, people in this part of the world are also plagued by heat, rodents, illicit liquour and a range of superstitions.
The Red of His Shadow is a breathtaking novel, a contemporary love story with the power of a Greek tragedy that takes the reader deep into the mysterious world of Haitian Voudon or Voodoo. This enamouring world of occult is so strange, yet pretty close to the 'Tantrik' and 'Baba' ways of Indian quackdom. The disturbing tale is inspired from the true and tragic love story of Simil Bolosse and Mistress Zule, the leaders of two warring factions or gagas or voodoo societies. Bordering on the bizarre, we read about black magic ceremonies where one leader bathes in the blood of more than 100 goats to see the other leader dead. The story also touches upon the miserable plight of the downtrodden Haitian immigrants who work in the sugar-cane fields of the Dominican Republic. Each year, tens of thousands of Haitians cross into the Dominican Republic to work as cane cutters, where they are subjected to the most pathetic working conditions patterned after the cruelest slave regimes. Because of their miserable plight, which remains till the end of their days, the workers have no recourse but to cling to their religious beliefs, imagining of some day of freedom. Out of this blind faith, builds forth groups called 'Societes' and gradually many societes congregate into the Gaga: a form of worship, a dedicated guild that few can penetrate. Led by powerful "Masters" or "Queens", the Gaga takes out its annual procession or pilgrimage through the fields that surround the sugar mill. This journey, marked by ritual stopping points, lasts for three days starting on Good Friday and ending on Easter Sunday. Frequently one Gaga crosses paths with another Gaga. The encounter can be absolutely cordial or extremely bloody. This book describes different events and lives leading upto the culmination with the crossing of paths between two warring Gagas led by Mistress Zule and Simil Bolosse. To help the readers understand the story well, and to represent the different routes that the voodoo procession takes through the country side of the Dominican Republic, there is also a map of the Dominican Republic and neighboring Haiti at the start of the book.
Where Montero brilliantly succeeds with this story are her extremely strong characters. The book begins with Zule Reve, the young mambo or priestess of one of the Gagas. At the age of 12, Zule, the wild and willful only surviving daughter of a cursed family, is anointed mambo, or priestess, of a powerful Dominican Voudon community and undergoes a seven-year apprenticeship to gain her position as a Mambo. Jeremie Cande, her loyal right-hand man is a mixed breed, a Haitian "China man", who remains tied to Zule as her protector, servant, a lover spurned but still hopelessly in love and consumed with jealousy. Anacaona is a Dominican woman living among the Haitians, a rare occurrence in a society where scorn and hatred for Dominicans has been built into the Haitian mindset since Dominicans wrested themselves free of Haitian rule in 1844. And finally there's Simila Bolosse, a Haitian renegade once Zule's lover and now her enemy, who has pledged to cut her to pieces if she refuses to join forces with him. As these characters circle and confront each other, Montero portrays a terrifying world poisoned by hate, greed, and sexual jealously, in which people cast spells to torture and kill, and, where the capricious gods, mount, or possess, their worshippers to enact bloody dramas of their own.
Essentially the story is that of love lost turned sour turned into political rivalry between two very powerful individuals. In illustrating the story thus, Montero writes with fire and acid. With Haitian poems that speak of love, lust and revenge. And thankfully without any kind of helpful or instructive or redemptive Christian-influenced finale. It's a ripping read, which most books that cut across cultures are not, and the story is seductive and glorious. The ending is blunt: It may not leave you satisfied, but it will certainly shock you.
The Red of His Shadow is a breathtaking novel, a contemporary love story with the power of a Greek tragedy that takes the reader deep into the mysterious world of Haitian Voudon or Voodoo. This enamouring world of occult is so strange, yet pretty close to the 'Tantrik' and 'Baba' ways of Indian quackdom. The disturbing tale is inspired from the true and tragic love story of Simil Bolosse and Mistress Zule, the leaders of two warring factions or gagas or voodoo societies. Bordering on the bizarre, we read about black magic ceremonies where one leader bathes in the blood of more than 100 goats to see the other leader dead. The story also touches upon the miserable plight of the downtrodden Haitian immigrants who work in the sugar-cane fields of the Dominican Republic. Each year, tens of thousands of Haitians cross into the Dominican Republic to work as cane cutters, where they are subjected to the most pathetic working conditions patterned after the cruelest slave regimes. Because of their miserable plight, which remains till the end of their days, the workers have no recourse but to cling to their religious beliefs, imagining of some day of freedom. Out of this blind faith, builds forth groups called 'Societes' and gradually many societes congregate into the Gaga: a form of worship, a dedicated guild that few can penetrate. Led by powerful "Masters" or "Queens", the Gaga takes out its annual procession or pilgrimage through the fields that surround the sugar mill. This journey, marked by ritual stopping points, lasts for three days starting on Good Friday and ending on Easter Sunday. Frequently one Gaga crosses paths with another Gaga. The encounter can be absolutely cordial or extremely bloody. This book describes different events and lives leading upto the culmination with the crossing of paths between two warring Gagas led by Mistress Zule and Simil Bolosse. To help the readers understand the story well, and to represent the different routes that the voodoo procession takes through the country side of the Dominican Republic, there is also a map of the Dominican Republic and neighboring Haiti at the start of the book.
Where Montero brilliantly succeeds with this story are her extremely strong characters. The book begins with Zule Reve, the young mambo or priestess of one of the Gagas. At the age of 12, Zule, the wild and willful only surviving daughter of a cursed family, is anointed mambo, or priestess, of a powerful Dominican Voudon community and undergoes a seven-year apprenticeship to gain her position as a Mambo. Jeremie Cande, her loyal right-hand man is a mixed breed, a Haitian "China man", who remains tied to Zule as her protector, servant, a lover spurned but still hopelessly in love and consumed with jealousy. Anacaona is a Dominican woman living among the Haitians, a rare occurrence in a society where scorn and hatred for Dominicans has been built into the Haitian mindset since Dominicans wrested themselves free of Haitian rule in 1844. And finally there's Simila Bolosse, a Haitian renegade once Zule's lover and now her enemy, who has pledged to cut her to pieces if she refuses to join forces with him. As these characters circle and confront each other, Montero portrays a terrifying world poisoned by hate, greed, and sexual jealously, in which people cast spells to torture and kill, and, where the capricious gods, mount, or possess, their worshippers to enact bloody dramas of their own.
Essentially the story is that of love lost turned sour turned into political rivalry between two very powerful individuals. In illustrating the story thus, Montero writes with fire and acid. With Haitian poems that speak of love, lust and revenge. And thankfully without any kind of helpful or instructive or redemptive Christian-influenced finale. It's a ripping read, which most books that cut across cultures are not, and the story is seductive and glorious. The ending is blunt: It may not leave you satisfied, but it will certainly shock you.
Wednesday, January 7, 2009
The New Year
It didn't start off well for me, neither did the old one end well for me. The problems of the old one kept running into my hopes for a splendid new one. For once I was willing to suspend my disbelief in all things good, and party my way off to a wannabe great start to a new year. But that was not to be! A week since the start of '09 and I think I am already down into the pits. Financial losses galore, the gloom of the recession biting into whatever bit of job remains in hand, and turmoil on the home front have all begun to take a huge toll. I remember a similar situation 10 years back, when I definitely did moonwalk into the troubles of depression. Then I converted into a loner, stopped going to school, took to travelling alone to distant parts of Mumbai city and just sit on some sidewalk and watch the world pass by. I went to lonely movie halls and saw porn movies galore sitting besides other loner losers wanking off their hard ons. I used to leave home early in the morning, and come back home late in the night, and my parents used to be happy in the belief that I am studying my ass off to glory. The examination results that came in a few months later were a shocker, not for me, but for my parents. I was surprised that I failed in just one subject, my parents were surprised that I ended up with the first failed subject in my life. The depression days continued for about a year, after which I pulled up my socks and put my life back in order. Sadly, it was a very difficult and steep climb up and today I might have been in a much better position in life had I not had that worrisome bout some 10 years back.
Today looks similar, in fact even bigger, at least then I didn't have to worry about where my next meal was gonna come from. And as my emotional resilience is down in the shatters, I hope that "The Tough gets going" really works for me.
Just yesterday at work, I felt as if I had died and, for some unknown reason, was still breathing. Humiliation is something you can't put a price label on, and quantify the loss.
I always maintained in my life, that I want to do work that I love, rather than work for the sake of collecting money. I know this is a ridiculously privileged attitude since so much of the world must concern itself with getting food. But I was (and still am) one of the privileged: I've always had clean water, clothes to spare, enough to eat. But still sadly enough, when you lose money that you had managed to accumulate after some years of hard work, that's when you realize that although money is not what you worked for, when it goes away, it does bite.
I have spent days agonizing over "How could you, why did you, why couldn't you, why me, what's the matter with the world, where's justice" kind of questions, to realize that these questions are better left unanswered, rather they will remain unanswered because no one knows the answers. Not even the experts. I have also been eager to blame someone else -- anyone else -- for the mess I am in. But after sucking myself into a Katrina of blame games, I begin wondering where does the blame end?
Unlike many people who lost everything in the stocks and scams, and unlike so much of the world, I still have money to live day-to-day. I am still working, and I am still living and eating well, and there is still nothing else I would rather do, than do the work I am doing right now. But still. I go to sleep at night oscillating between ranting about the world and being terrified that I will lose my job and I won't be able to keep my house. Then I realize that, for me, the real suffering is not living without money; it's living with this rage. The devastation is bad, but if I don't allow myself to feel this, then I can't learn what there is to learn. I will not see, for instance, that I participated in my own downfall by not adhering to sound processes that my workplace believes in.
And while my downfall is really, really minor as compared to thousands of crores of investor wealth that got lost in the equity bourses, and so also my humiliation as compared to the embarassment that the chief of Satyam, R Raju has to face when he revealed that he has fleeced the company and its stakeholders of 7000 crores, I still can't stop the blame game. Even when well wishers snap at me advising me to gather my wits, I accuse them of not being sympathetic enough with my concerns. And if I don't engage in blame, I see the answer clearly: because I believed in something else more -- I believed in accumulating. And when you believe in accumulating, you see what you don't have, not what you have. My relationship to money was no different from my relationship to food, to love, to looking good: I never felt as if I had enough. I was always focused on the bite that was yet to come, not the one in my mouth. I was focused on the way my partner wasn't perfect, not the love that was. And on the chiselled body I saw on a gym boy poster, not the health that reflected from my rounded cheeks.
Although there is the loss, there is also the necessity -- the urgency-- of staying in the moment. The money I lost will never come back. And some sadness to grieve for the same is justified. But from the path of sadness I often wander into fear -- what if my parents or I get sick and we can't pay the medical bills, what if there is an accident and I can't work, what will I do when I get old -- I'm lost, too. I need someone to guide me from this path of fear back to the path of sadness back to the path of contentment. And happiness. And I need to realize that I need to look inside me for finding this someone.
Today looks similar, in fact even bigger, at least then I didn't have to worry about where my next meal was gonna come from. And as my emotional resilience is down in the shatters, I hope that "The Tough gets going" really works for me.
Just yesterday at work, I felt as if I had died and, for some unknown reason, was still breathing. Humiliation is something you can't put a price label on, and quantify the loss.
I always maintained in my life, that I want to do work that I love, rather than work for the sake of collecting money. I know this is a ridiculously privileged attitude since so much of the world must concern itself with getting food. But I was (and still am) one of the privileged: I've always had clean water, clothes to spare, enough to eat. But still sadly enough, when you lose money that you had managed to accumulate after some years of hard work, that's when you realize that although money is not what you worked for, when it goes away, it does bite.
I have spent days agonizing over "How could you, why did you, why couldn't you, why me, what's the matter with the world, where's justice" kind of questions, to realize that these questions are better left unanswered, rather they will remain unanswered because no one knows the answers. Not even the experts. I have also been eager to blame someone else -- anyone else -- for the mess I am in. But after sucking myself into a Katrina of blame games, I begin wondering where does the blame end?
Unlike many people who lost everything in the stocks and scams, and unlike so much of the world, I still have money to live day-to-day. I am still working, and I am still living and eating well, and there is still nothing else I would rather do, than do the work I am doing right now. But still. I go to sleep at night oscillating between ranting about the world and being terrified that I will lose my job and I won't be able to keep my house. Then I realize that, for me, the real suffering is not living without money; it's living with this rage. The devastation is bad, but if I don't allow myself to feel this, then I can't learn what there is to learn. I will not see, for instance, that I participated in my own downfall by not adhering to sound processes that my workplace believes in.
And while my downfall is really, really minor as compared to thousands of crores of investor wealth that got lost in the equity bourses, and so also my humiliation as compared to the embarassment that the chief of Satyam, R Raju has to face when he revealed that he has fleeced the company and its stakeholders of 7000 crores, I still can't stop the blame game. Even when well wishers snap at me advising me to gather my wits, I accuse them of not being sympathetic enough with my concerns. And if I don't engage in blame, I see the answer clearly: because I believed in something else more -- I believed in accumulating. And when you believe in accumulating, you see what you don't have, not what you have. My relationship to money was no different from my relationship to food, to love, to looking good: I never felt as if I had enough. I was always focused on the bite that was yet to come, not the one in my mouth. I was focused on the way my partner wasn't perfect, not the love that was. And on the chiselled body I saw on a gym boy poster, not the health that reflected from my rounded cheeks.
Although there is the loss, there is also the necessity -- the urgency-- of staying in the moment. The money I lost will never come back. And some sadness to grieve for the same is justified. But from the path of sadness I often wander into fear -- what if my parents or I get sick and we can't pay the medical bills, what if there is an accident and I can't work, what will I do when I get old -- I'm lost, too. I need someone to guide me from this path of fear back to the path of sadness back to the path of contentment. And happiness. And I need to realize that I need to look inside me for finding this someone.
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