On Golden Pond

 At sixty-four, T.S. Eliot's lines from his poem "The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock" resonate with me.

"...No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;

Am an attendant lord, one that will do

To swell a progress, start a scene or two,

Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,

Deferential, glad to be of use,

Politic, cautious, and meticulous;

Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;

At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—

Almost, at times, the Fool.

I grow old ... I grow old ...

I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?

I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me...."

Well, if not for white flannel trousers with the bottoms rolled, I have for the past fifteen months lolled mostly in short pants and old T-shirts. 

And instead of the beach, I find myself on Golden Pond.

The other day a wag pronounced on TV, "Growing up is hard. Growing old is harder". That's a made-for-Twitter quote, I thought.

Growing up is challenging, but growing old can be a delight going by my immediate past. 

One suffers love-sickness, money-sickness and fame-sickness when young and just sickness when old. "Same difference", as today's young would say. So you swallow your share of tablets, exercise regularly and watch what you eat. No problems.

On introspection, I have realized that the real challenge of growing old lies mainly in the psyche.

"The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.." - John Milton, Paradise Lost.

Some tell me I have under-achieved both in fame and fortune. I don't know whether or not that is true. But even if true, I do not feel the sting. 

Au contraire, I sometimes wonder, whether fame and fortune would have allowed my current equipoise. 

I shall not pretend that I did not suffer the rat race in the three decades into my sixties. But the commitment was just an inch deep, leaving no scars behind.

Perhaps my participation in the rat race was somewhat disinterested because I dealt with deep emotional trauma—a situation much harder to deal with than growing up, down, sideways or old.

And then, over these past months, I have found my angle of repose. 

I discovered the joys of growing inwards, well beyond the vicissitudes of growing up or growing old.

Growing inwards is not easy, nor is it hard. It just is.

I came to this state of being by allowing myself to do what I should have done in my youth and adulthood - embarking on a study of philosophy and literature. 

My education in technology and management and my profession in marketing communication and martech are outward-looking pursuits.

The reading of literature and philosophy remained, with me, leisure-time pursuits.

Over the past fifteen months, as I switched my priorities around, a new growth path opened.

The pursuit of literature and philosophy requires no external validation. But, at the same time, it is an endeavour that opens up vistas where you are one with all the world - everyone and everything in it - across space and time.

I write this not to advocate that the only path to peace is through a deep dive in philosophy or literature. Instead, my insight is that every one of us has a natural state of being. Yet, very often, we do not recognize or act on this natural self. Thus, I studied at IIT and IIM not because I had any natural inclination to technology and management but simply because I got in! Nor did I spend decades in marketing communication because I have a deep love for advertising but because it was well-paying and somewhat glamorous in those bygone times. 

I am grateful that I, at last, have found my calling. It fills my day (even in these vexed times) with daily discoveries and adventures. 

I realize there must be a fortunate few who find their calling early in life. Are they the ones who make great things happen? Perhaps. But that is not the point. At whatever age you get to the shore of this Golden Pond, however long you are there, it elevates your life.

Behind the repose, I feel these days, could be a much deeper truth.

A sentiment expressed, as only Ghalib can, in the following couplet:

बे ख़ुदी बे सबब नहीं ग़ालिब

कुछ तो है जिसकी पर्दा दारी है

- मिर्ज़ा ग़ालिब

Be khudi be sabab nahi ghalib

kuch to hai jis ki parda dari hai

- Mirza Ghalib

"This rapture is not without reason O Ghalib

something hides behind the veil."

Whether this rapture of mine reaches the point where to paraphrase Paramhansa Ramkrishna, I become a salt doll that leaps into the Golden Pond and become one with it; I do not know.

Kabir summed up the "salt doll" state in this pithy doha:

जिस मरनै थै जग डरै, सो मेरे आनंद। 

कब मरिहूँ कब देखिहूँ, पूरन परमानंद॥ 

• Kabir

Jise marne the jag dare, so mere anand.

Kab amrunh, kab dekhun, puran parmanand>

"While the world fears death, I eagerly await that eternal bliss." 

Far from being confident of reaching Kabir's state, I might even lose my current angle of repose. Post the pandemic; the material world could catch up with me with a vengeance. Or the physical depredations of old age deepen and wreak havoc on my balance.

Even so, my current state, I believe, would have furnished me the kind of dauntless courage that Dylan Thomas advocates to fight the anomie and the agony.

 Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light. 

• Dylan Thomas

Walk The World

One of the few joys of the past pandemic-inflicted months has been walking.  In the face of gym closures, endless Zoom calls, OTT binges, doom scrolling and the temptations of a well-stocked fridge, I have taken to walking for hours. Last month I averaged about 150 minutes a day!

One may walk by oneself, but one never walks alone. If lucky enough, one could be walking with nature, in the company of greenery, under the great blue sky, accompanied by birdsong and like.

I am stuck walking the compound of a Mumbai multistory while needing to ward off some unwelcome walking companions, including the multiple stresses of the day's numerous Zoom meetings, the doom and gloom that the daily news brings and once-in-a-while a neighbour who can, unlike me, both chat and walk.

So I walk in a bubbly, so to speak, engaged with my imagination. Some days it is music that lifts me out of myself and makes my tread lighter. Some days it is a podcast that stimulates the mind and adds to the calories burnt. But on most days, I find myself with an audiobook. 

Because I see when I walk with a book, an entire world walks with me.

After some experimentation with music and podcasts, I decided that my best option is to revisit or strike up an acquaintance with great books by listening to their audio versions.

Audible, the Amazon-owned App, offers a great selection at affordable prices (the India version translates the USD price to INR at purchasing-power-parity rates instead of the nominal exchange rates).

The production is usually of the highest quality. And the world of audiobooks has its stars - the voices that read the book. 

Over the past months, I have listened to three classics.

• The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer narrated by his son John Buffalo Mailer 
• Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky, translated from the Russian by Constance Garnett narrated by Anthony Heald 
• Godaan bu Munshi Premchand in the original Hindi narrated by Sameer Goswami 

I had read the first two books as a teenager, and Godaan was my introduction to Munshi Premchand. 

As a teenager, "The Naked and The Dead" and "Crime and Punishment" were heavy going, and I do not remember whether they had a significant impact on me. However, both the books blew me away this time around and left me with world-view impacting insights. 

Was it that the mature mind gets more out of literature than a callow teenager? It has more to do, perhaps, with the power of the spoken word without the distraction and anxiety of engaging with it visually. 

That lets the mind conjure the world evoked by the words with that much more clarity and colour.

Coming to Godaan, I have always rued my unfamiliarity with Hindi literature (in the original or translations) and literature in other Indian languages. I knew this lacuna contributed to a lack in my cultural gestalt. 

I have, on my previous occasions, tried to read Hindi literature in the original. I did read a few pages of Godaan a couple of years ago. But found it hard going because of my unfamiliarity with written Hindi. However, listening to Samir Goswami's riveting narration of Godaan was a pleasure because I am very familiar with the rhythms and cadences of spoken Hindi. 

I have promised myself that I will now listen to all available audiobook version of Hindi literature. Alas, as of now, not much is extant. 

This lack of well-produced audiobooks and translations of Indian language literature, I guess, is a chicken and egg problem. There is not enough demand because there is not enough supply. 

I guess this will change as younger generations emerge that are not "Macauly's children" as many of my cohort of the well-heeled and "well-educated" are.

I usually, for this blog, write about the books I have recently read and liked.

Here is a very brief comparative review of the three books mentioned above.

"Crime and Punishment", published in the 1850s, is set in Tsarist Russia. Its protagonist Raskolnikov is among the most tortured individuals portrayed in literature. And the fact is that the prime torturer of Raskolnikov is Raskolnikov himself! Dostoevsky's brilliance lies in how he conveys the dread Raskolnikov feels as being independent of the plot details. Early in the novel, Raskolnikov commits a senseless double murder and then proceeds to give himself away in equally meaningless ways. Be that as may be, Raskolnikov, one could conclude, be equally angst-ridden even in the early sylvan days of the garden of Eden! Though existentialism as philosophy got traction only in the 1930s and 40s, to mind, "Crime and Punishment" is a thoroughly existential novel. Sartre's saying, "Hell is other people." could have no better exegesis than "Crime and Punishment."  

"The Naked and the Dead", published in 1948, is set on a small Pacific island during a WWII operation by a US Army Division that executes and succeeds in a campaign to drive out a Japanese division from it. However, by no means is it a war novel. Its underpinnings are also existential. However, while the outlook of "Crime and Punishment" is essentially Russian, in that it sees the meaninglessness of life as a source of agony and captivity, 'The Naked and the Dead" is essentially American in its existentialism. It translates meaninglessness into self-centeredness and freedom. War and death are as meaningless as domestic life back home is, but through it all, the quintessential American point-of-view is "So what? All it means is I do it my way because nobody and nothing else matters."

Does the difference in outlook in some way explain the contrast between the modern history US and Russian? Perhaps, in some ways, it does

Godaan is rooted in its social milieu. It eschews the interiority -the relentless depiction of an individual's internal landscape at the core of both "Crime and Punishment" and "The Naked and the Dead".

The protagonist of Godaan is no single person. Instead, it is the social and class system that drives the narrative. The arc of the book moves towards a denouement. In that sense, Godaan is classical storytelling. 

Godaan does not yet have a place in the modern canon of any respectable literature department in universities across the world. It is not the lack of translation that prevents it from becoming so. A 1968 translation titled "A Gift of A Cow" by Gordon C. Roadermel is considered, in some circles, a classic by itself.

The reason for its non-inclusion in the canon of world literature could be two-fold. The first reason is structural: "It is plot-driven! This thing happened, and then that thing happened! Come on! That's a beach read, not literature" The second reason goes a little deeper. Accepting social constraints and working within a system is a purely Eastern way of looking at life. And the world of recognition and awards is, as of now, governed by Western mores. 

The East sees the world through the "us" lens, the West through the "me" lens.

Over the past three centuries, the "me" lens has given the world science, technology, and abundance along with inequality, loneliness, dread, and excess. 

The "us" lens once gave the world its spiritual underpinnings - Vedas, Confuscious, Buddha, Jesus and many more. Still, it got lost in navel-gazing and involuted dogma that allowed the West to conquer and subjugate.

Is the worm about to turn? Could it be that the three C's - Covid, Climate Change and China- the harbinger of a paradigm shift back to the "us" lens. That is grist for another day, another post.

Klara and Adam in The Garden of Aiden: My Take On "Machines Like Me" and "Klara And The Sun"

Literature at its best is at the vanguard of paradigmatic changes in human civilization.

Dicken's "Hard Times" portends both the misery and the promise of the Industrial Age's right at its onset in the early nineteenth century.

Even a poet like Wordsworth voiced a shudder at the rise of the machines.

In the early 1990s, Neal Stephenson single-handedly invented the cyberpunk genre with his "Snow Crash" and later in the decade with "Cryptonomicon". Both books glimpse the opportunity, challenges and threat that would arise out of the Information Age and the Internet. 

With his 2013 book "The Circle", Dave Eggers anticipated the immense challenges that the age of social media and surveillance capitalism posed. 

Many are now anticipating that a new age is about to dawn - the Age of Artificial Intelligence.

For decades science fiction writers have been incorporating AI into their plots. The most famous one being the somewhat villainous computer HAL in Arthur C Clarke's 1964 book "2001: A Space Odyssey", which passed into popular lore with Stanley Kubrick's 1968 movie of the same name. However, with due apologies to Clarke and his fellow science fiction writers, nobody, including, I suspect, themselves, would categorize their efforts as literature.

For the debut of AI in serious literature, we will instead have to look to the past few years as AI begins to make its tentative debut in everyday life with Siri, Alexa etc. 

 I believe I have detected the debut of AI in two books of high literary value. One published in 2019 by Ian McEwan, and the other by Kazuro Ishiguro launched in 2021.

I am a fan of Ian McEwan and Kazuro Ishiguro, two writers of fiction who would rank as living masters of English literature.

The oeuvre of each defies categorization in terms of genre. Every book of the two stands on its own, each offering a startling new perspective that is all it's own.

McEwan can swing from a ruminative novel on the nature of writing (some classify it as meta-fiction) in "Atonement" (2001) to a novella "Nutshell" (2015), a noir thriller that has added a unique voice to the pantheon of narraters, an unborn baby!

However, McEwan and Ishiguro have distinctive styles as different from each other as chalk and cheese.

McEwan's voice is all exteriority. It crystalizes and captures the gestalt with sentences that leap off the page.

Ishiguro, on the other hand, is all interiority. His quiet sentences inveigle and tantalize, and the context and the plot is a slow revelation.  In an Ishiguro book, only Ishiguro knows what motivates the protagonist and where the story heads. Much like, for people who believe in Him (Her?), only God knows what we are thinking and where our lives lead.

In "The Remains of The Day" (1989), Ishiguro slow-reveals an English butler Stevens's interiority. A man whose stiff upper lip exterior hides a storm of suppressed emotions of regrets and unexpressed love. "Remains of The Day" has also passed on to popular lore with its movie version of the same name, directed by James Ivory and released in 1993.

With "Never Let Me Go" (2005), Ishiguro takes his first look at the near future. The premise of the book could have made for a good science fiction book. "Never Let Me Go" is set in a society that creates clones who live an everyday life - good schooling, friends, a profession - until the time comes to harvest their organs to extend or save the life of a "real" human. 

It seems like a plot just right for a regular science-fiction potboiler. However, in the hands of Ishiguro, the result is a moving masterpiece. Kathy H, the protagonist, is a clone who is unaware that she is a clone, and thinks of herself as an excellent caregiver and reminisces fondly about her past and the friends she made at a school. Until, of course, the tragic end that catches her unaware. Under Ishiguro's touch, this dystopian setting yields a timeless question - what is it to be human?

There are parallels from "Never Let Me Go" in Ishiguro's latest book - "Kalra And The Sun".

The geographical and socio-economic setting "Klara And The Sun" is left to the reader to interpret and colour from sly hints scattered through the book. In this respect, the book is "Ishiguroish" to the max. This vagueness of the context springs from the central narrative ploy. The book is a first-person account from Klara, an "Artificial Friend" (AF) that affluent parents buy for their child.  AFs are not toys, but so are they not powerful  AI entities. For one in a world that probably has the Internet, they cannot connect to it, and so they probably know less about the world than the child who owns them. However, they can interpret the world of human speech and emotions and navigate human relationships' complexity.  The AFs are solar-powered. Klara belongs to a sick child, Josie, who might be dying when her single mother buys Klara for her. As the plot slowly unfolds, the reader realizes that the mother chose Klara for a particular purpose. And because Klara is unusually compassionate and imaginative for an AF. Klara's creative abilities lead her to accord the Sun a mythic, God-like status. And her compassion leads, at the climax of the book, to make a sacrifice that could only be possible for a being whose emotive faculty overrules her cognitive ability.

The interpretation of the context in which the plotline of "Klara and The Sun" unfolds are all mine. Ishiguro makes nothing explicit. Someone else could interpret both the context and the plot very differently. And that is at the heart of Ishiguro's oeuvre's uniqueness and what puts him at the top-of-the-ladder of contemporary writers.

Another personal takeaway from "Klara and The Sun" for me was that Ishiguro imagines AI and its place in human civilization similar to fire. In essence, the discovery of fire enabled man to reach a higher level of existence. AI will also do so. Of course, like fire AI could also be destructive, but unlike fire, AI and its progress are under man's control, and if we take care, its beneficial avatar could be the only one that takes hold.  As an enabler of everyday human activity, AI is an issue I have also written about in an earlier post - "Concierge Intelligence & The Fulfilment of The Promise of The Digital Age."

And if AI goes the benign route, in time, AI will evolve as a species with emotional lives and relationship concerns. Concerns that "Klara And The Sun" bring to the fore masterfully. The issue facing humankind in AI may not be the singularity but building a code of behaviour for humans in their interaction with sentient AIs.

Asimov's "Three Laws Of Robotics" were all about protecting humans from robots. Instead, we might have to evolve a code that ensures humane treatment of sentient AIs.

Ian McEwan's book "Machines Like Me" offers a startlingly different view of AI's evolution as a companion to humans. 

In "Machines Like Me", McEwan meticulously reimagines the past. Alan Turing does not commit suicide, and thus, computer sciences evolution progresses faster, and by the eighties, AI entities as human companions are on the market. They come in two models - Adam and Eve - and are pricey. They have a body that is human-like in all respects. Beautiful and well-formed, they are even capable of sex. They are connected to the Internet and collect and process information at speed, making them cognitively superior to their human owners. The owner can give them a personality by choosing from various available templates. The protagonist of "Machines Like Me" is one such AI entity - Adam - bought by an impoverished day trader, Charlie Friend,  who splurges a small inheritance on buying Adam. Charlies is in love with a young woman who is an upstairs neighbour. The plot progresses with Adam also falling in love with Charlie's girlfriend while also discovering unsavoury stuff about her. Charlie uses Adam to trade on his behalf, and because of Adam's unique ability, he makes a lot of money. The plot's climax is dark and ends up with Charlie bankrupt, the girlfriend in jail and Charlie deactivating Adam and taking him to Alan Turing to complain about what Turing's brilliance has wrought. 

Both Adam and Klara are AI entities whose main function is to act as companions to human beings. Both Adam and Klara develop human fallibilities but at the opposite end of the spectrum. If the future goes the Klara way, we will need to learn to treat our future AI companions compassionately. On the other hand, if they go the Adam way, we will need some version of Asimov's Three Law of Robotics to protect us from them. 

In reality, we will probably end up with both poles and everything in between. The "Garden of Aiden" (excuse the pun), first populated by Klara and Adam in the imagination of Ishiguro and McEwan, will likely produce a world as complex as the mythical Garden of Eden did,

The Viral Wars - A Scenario for the Near-Future

 At heart, I am an optimist, but the past few months have forced me to consider the possibility of a world gone awry.

Humanity's last major, paradigm-changing upheaval - the two World Wars - played out over four decades - the 1910s to the 1940's - with the echoes of the disruption lasting well into the 50s and the 60s. The 50s also saw the beginnings of a new world order emerging culminating in a world of rising prosperity and globalization lasting well into the first decade of the 21st century.

At the core of the conflagration of the two World Wars was the emergence of the concept of a nation defined by geography and ethnic groups. This socio-political and socio-cultural phenomenon combined with the socio-economic power of the first phase of the Industrial Age. A power that enabled nations to unleash mass destruction on one another culminating with Hiroshima and the atomic bomb.

The two World Wars were driven by the mistaken assumption that one nation-state could conquer and annex another nation-state through an attack lasting a few years. This was a hangover from the previous era of "war as an event" concept of two armies facing each other on an open field and the vanquished accepting the victor as the new master. This belief when married to the destructive power of the weapons unleashed by the Industrial Age resulted in the paradigm-shifting follies that were the two World Wars. Thankfully the atomic age put an end to the notion.

As a result, wars like the Vietnam, Korean, Indo-Pak and the Egypt-Israel wars remained limited in scope. This also ensured that the Cold War between the USSR and the Western Alliance remained cold.

However, what if the worm had begun to turn once in the second decade of the 21st century?

Globalization and the Information Age has produced tremendous economic prosperity across the globe as well as shared knowledge of the inter-connectedness of the world among individuals, societies and cultures.

On the flip side, it has also produced great inequality among the economic classes as also given profoundly different cult-like viewpoints powerful platforms to coalesce and gain power.

Great income equality has always existed, but modern technology has meant that income inequality in modern times has translated to a significant disparity at the very core of life. In the Middle Ages and even in the first phase of the Industrial Age, higher incomes essentially translated to higher social status through pomp and circumstance and a somewhat better quality of life through larger houses, more servants, better food, better carriages, horses and so. The quality of life of a KKiing in the Middle Ages or an early Industrial Age Baron would around 20 on a scale of 1 o 100. The King's courtiers and the tradesmen and managers of the Industrial Age at say 15 and the serf or the sweatshop worker at say 7.

The modern age had changed what income inequality means. The rich can reach any part of the world in a matter of hours travelling in unbelievable luxury. While the middle classes are mostly stuck to the drudgery of the daily commute. Riches can today mean not just much higher life expectancy but much better fitness and vitality to enjoy the "la dolce vita" of a rich man's life. While the middle classes live dogged by illness-causing stress and pollution.

There has, of course, been progress. Technology and higher productivity have ensured that.

Today's blue or white-collar drudge has moved to 25 from the 7 of the serf or the sweatshop worker of the earlier ages. The lower and middle class on essence have better quality than the kings of yore or the robber barons of the early Industrial Age. At the same time the leap in the quality of life index of the affluent - the bureaucrats, the technocrats and the professional classes - and the rich - the captains of industry, the tech entrepreneurs, the celebrity sports and entertainment stars - has leapt way beyond. Would it be wrong to say that if one is affluent or wealthy today and mindful of one's health, one can enjoy a quality of life near the top end of the scale? Perhaps near 60 for the affluents and say near the 80s for the rich. Advances in medicine - slowing the depredations of age, implants that augment the senses, genetics combined with the magic of AI and commercial space travel will push the quality of life of the truly rich closer to 100. At the same time, the middle class will be stuck in the early 30s.

The situation becomes combustible if you mix in the proliferation of 24x7 media that hypes the lifestyles of the rich and the famous down the throat of the middle classes endlessly. 

As a result, the Gini index - the measure of inequality - is magnified several times when transformed into an index of resentment and suppressed rage.

This suppressed rage and resentment finds expression within cultures, societies and individuals in different ways. They set up unique hate figures, rationale, conspiracy theories and ultimate solutions. Before the age of social media dawned, individuals, expressed these ideas to a small group in their circle who they found were similar to them in status and way of thinking.

With the dawn of social media, this changed dramatically. 

Billions are now avid consumers of social media not because they have a deep desire to know what their friends or relatives are doing or gawk at photographs and memes. Instead, their addiction is to the reinforcement of their view-of-the-world day-in-and-day out. They find that many share their views and not just strengthen them but add more virulent dimensions to them. And very often, this group affinity moves from online interaction to offline action. A tribe is formed that is ready to defend its turf not just online but on the streets and in the politics of power.

This social-media-driven tribalization is not an accidental result. It is an outcome of painstakingly designed algorithms the Facebooks and Instagrams of this world that deepen engagement with the platform. This is done purely in commercial interest. The Zuckerbergs of this world, in truth, do not care about anything else despite their hoodie-wearing new age spiel.

To this simmering cauldron of rising inequalities and tribalism, the Gods added Covid19. Each passing day, it emerges that Covid19 is of the same order of dangerousness to the 2020s as the Spanish Flu was to the 1910s.

The Spanish Flu ended World War I as it competed with it in killing millions. But it sowed the seeds of the Great Depression and World War II.

Could it be that this pandemic will lead the world into a different kind of war? Exacerbating the inequities of the times as well as the greed and incompetence of the establishment at large. The rich and the well-to-do gorge on the money spigots opened by panicking central banks while the rest - the working class, including the essential workers - confront death and deprivation.

In the early days of this pandemic, I was hopeful that this shock might wake up the world and in time make it a better place. In the same way that the Black Plague of the Middle Ages hurried the dawning of the Renaissance. I expressed this view in a post titled "The Coming Age of Ambiversion?" published on June 7th, 2020. The question mark in title was prescient.

The situation had gone downhill after that. As Governments and the health infrastructure across the world continue to lose the battle. And the rich and the well-to-do gorge on stock market gains and easy money. While the complaint of the privileged is about the imagined tribulations of WFH, online learning and boredom(!), the many either work in dangerous conditions or suffer hunger and deprivation without work.

Will the coming of an effective vaccine return the world to some sort of normalcy? Perhaps, if a truly effective vaccine is developed and universally distributed. But much before that will come the Vaccine Wars. A handful of rich countries with 13% of the world population have cornered 50%of the production capacity of the leading vaccines. Imagine the mayhem that will follow as soon as a vaccine or two is cleared by the authorities. Besides, it is quite clear that the so-called leaders are clearly compromised by political expediency and ever-present greed and corruption.

Imagine the misery if an approved vaccine or vaccines do not just prove to be ineffective but cause damage and death. 

That will only hasten the arrival of a full-blown era of worldwide conflict I like to think of as the "Viral Wars".

Even if the world did find an effective vaccine and distributed it equitably, the Covid19 crisis might have created a rift in human civilization that makes the Viral War inevitable.

What will the Viral Wars be like? It will be very different from the World Wars but equally destructive and paradigm-shifting. 

Unlike the World Wars, it will not be between countries but among tribes. Tribes that are each driven by an explosive mix of ideology, faith, conspiracy theories forming a world view that each will be willing to die for. 

I call them The Viral Wars because they will be infectious and spread across the world. Unchecked, gathering momentum every day, bringing death and deprivation in their wake. Until after decades the world develops herd immunity or someone or some force finds a vaccine.

Imagine scores of multinational Al Quedas, Qnons, White Supremacists, neo-Nazis, Antifas at each other's throats within and across national borders. Equipped with military-grade weapons and state-of-the-art cyber and AI skills. What about federal Governments and armies? Many of them will side with one tribe or the other. Or be too weak to be effective in quelling anything. The dystopian world of many a sci-fi movie - Mad Max, Blade Runner - will be at hand. The poets imagined such a world much before the screenwriters did.

Consider these famous lines by Yeats from his poem "The Second Coming":

Turning and turning in the widening gyre 

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere 

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst 

Are full of passionate intensity.

You will notice the absence of a question mark in the title of this dark vision of the future in contrast to the more hopeful one posited as the Age of Ambiversion.

It is because history has taught me that the worst had to come to pass before the good dawns. Perhaps after The Viral Wars will come The Age of Ambiversion.

Interiority - The Ineffable Art of Hilary Mantel and the Wolf Hall Trilogy

I read Wolf Hall the first of Hilary Mantel's trilogy based on the life of Thomas Cromwell in 2010,  an Englishman born a commoner in the 16th century. Cromwell rose to great power in the court of Henry VIII before meeting a tragic end - a chopped off head as many an ambitious person did in Henry's rein including famously one his many queens - Anne Boleyn.

I found Wolf Hall fascinating in one unique way. It was the tone of the book. Without being in the first-person singular Wolf Hall captures the complex interiority of Thomas Cromwell as he negotiates the treacherous path to power in Henry's byzantine court. A feat of technique that I have not come across in any other book.

It helps that Cromwell, in Ms Mantel's telling, a modern man. A man whose secular belief in unsentimental rationality would have been at home in the corridors of power in the 21st century.

Cromwell's view of the world, in Ms Mantel's riveting prose, rises above mundane details, while being fully alive to the core human dynamics of any given situation. Whether this was a real-life trait of Thomas Cromwell or an emergence from Ms Mantel's art, there is no way of knowing and perhaps not even pertinent to the creative excellence that won the book the Man Booker award.

I awaited the second book eagerly - Bring Up The Bodies - and strove to read it fresh of the presses, so to speak, in 2012. Eager once gain to inhabit the mind of one of English history's most enigmatic figure - Thomas Cromwell - through the magic of Ms Mantel's ineffable art.

I was not disappointed and once again waited eagerly for the third and last book of the series.

This time the wait was a bit longer. The third book - The Mirror and The Light - came out this year.

Meanwhile, BBC had produced one of its masterly mini-series called Wolf Hall directed by Peter Kosminsky with the incomparable Mark Rylance. At around the same time, the Royal Shakespeare Company put out stage versions of Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies with Ben Miles playing Thomas Cromwell,

While I have been able to watch the mini-series, the plays have been out of my reach. The news is that they will open in Broadway soon. If and when that street lights up again.

However, in circles where people discuss such things the comparative merits of Mr Rylance's and Mr Miles' interpretation is as hot a topic as say the performances of Hamlet by Jonathan Pryce, Anton Lesser and Mark Rylance. 

By 2020 I had become a fan of audiobooks. When I heard that Mr Miles is going to read "The Mirror and The Light" under the supervision of Ms Mantel, I decided to go first with the audiobook and leave the delights of the printed page to later.

The big-name reviewers have damned "The Mirror and The Light' with faint praise. Perhaps their expectations, in the light of, "Wolf Hall" and "Bring Up The Bodies" were set too high. 

 I am happy to report that I am as delighted by "The Mirror and the Light" as I was by the earlier two books.

This third book has the same “interiority” as the first two books of the Wolf Hall trilogy. 

Interiority is different from writing in the first person, A first-person account is limited by the specifics of the context and the power of expression that the novelist imbues the character with. On the other hand, in the interiority mode, Ms Mantel has the freedom to plumb Cromwell’s consciousness without being limited by the context of the particulars of the time and the plot.

As a result, the trilogy mines a deep insight into human nature. The universal truth that goodness, generosity, wisdom, love and other positive traits of human nature transcend the particulars of the context of the age or the specifics of an individual’s circumstances. While, on the other hand, the flip side of human nature - greed, hate, lust, meanness etc.- are deeply rooted in the context of the age and the details of a person’s life. This is, in essence, is the same truth that many schools of philosophy and spirituality expound. Ms Mantel does it while gliding us along the arc of a story that grips and thrills across three best-sellers.

And the reading by Mr Miles a piece of art in itself. It lit up many a solitary walk within the confines of my quarantined life.

Ms Mantel evocation of Cromwell's interiority as he walks to his execution will, in my thinking, rank high among passages in literature that break new ground.

Mr Miles has also now read Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies. So the entire trilogy is now available as audiobooks of the highest quality. If you have not yet tasted the power of audiobooks, there could be no better introduction to them as Mantel's Wolf Hall trilogy performed by Ben Miles.

I, for one, intend to read Ms Mantel's other books - there are nine before she started in the trilogy. The first one is "Every Day is Mother's Day". The blurb informs me that it is a black comedy set in the 70s. I am eager to discover whether "Interiority" is a technique that Ms Mantel invented for the Wolf Hall trilogy or whether it pervades all her books. 

American Dirt: Proof Why Literature Is The Deepest of The Arts

Usually, it takes years and decades for a novel or a collection of poetry before being classified as literature. That is so because the purists believe that a work has to stand the test of time. 

Nevertheless, I would put American Dirt, the latest novel from Jeanine Cummins in that hallowed category.

Standing the test of time is right. But equally essential is to illuminate the issues of one's own time in a profound yet emotionally resonant way.

In my book, the central issue of our time is inequality.

Inequality in human society has been around since time immemorial. 

Why then do I think it is the central issue facing us today. Why does it have "the fierce urgency of now"? An urgency that ratchets up every day, every place that it is left unaddressed.

The paradox is that it is the plentitude of our age that leads to this core crisis of our age: The Inequity of Inequality. 

Progress in science and technology has lead to leaps in productivity that can support a comfortable life for every man, woman and child in the world.

Instead, we have increasing inequality of income between nations and within nations between classes and communities.

Instead, we have the rapacious greed of the rich and the shameless leading inexorably to a climate catastrophe.

A symptom of the current universal madness that grips the world is the crisis of forced migration of millions. Terrorised families and children fleeing from hotspots in the Middle East - Syria, Yemen etc. - and South America - Mexico, Venezuela, Columbia, Honduras - not is the search of a better life but only life - to live without starvation and death staring at them every minute.

And instead of those who have plenty welcoming these dispossessed with open arms, we have the well-to-do in Europe and the US respond with fear. Fear of sharing their prosperity and well-being with others. Fear that sharing will diminish. Forgetting the lessons that history has tried to teach us again and again that it is fear and greed that reduce while hope and generosity elevate.

American Dirt is a classic not just because it grips with the drama of a mother and her eight-year-old son's bid to escape death as they flee of a drug lord massacres their entire family. It is a classic not just because every page in the book has a vignette and an insight into human nature that is on par with anything else you will find in any of our great, canonical works. To my mind, it is a classic because it shines a light on the essential truth that the generosity of spirit is the key to heaven - the heaven that is ever-present at the core of our being and waiting for us to unlock the door and step in. And the core gift of American Dirt is it leads teh reader to a realisation that this generosity of spirit - this key to the heaven within - is accessible to all of us, all the time. Even in the direst of circumstances. We can share even when we have little. We can strive to ignite hope when all seems lost. And that it will be this same generosity of spirit that will rescue humanity from its current crises - terrorism, nationalism, racism, poverty, climate change - and allow human civilisation to reach for the next stage of our evolution.

I am currently reading two other books - both non-fiction - which both promise to be in the instant classic class that American Dirt is. They also address critical issues facing our current era.  I look forward to posting about them once I have completed reading them. If you have the time and inclination here are their titles: 

Twilight of Democracy: The Failure of Politics and The Parting of Friends by Anne Applebaum

Caste: The Lies That Divide Us by Isabel Wilkerson