August 16, 2017
by Neelima
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Hieroglyphics and Facebook Robot Language @ Link Wanderlust

In light of the recent news of Facebook’s robots having created their own language, Candida Moss goes back to the story of decipherment in her story Inside the Deadly Pursuit of Unsolved Languages. It was almost 218 years ago, she says, that the Rosetta Stone was discovered in 1799 and with that the deciphering of hieroglyphics. The author traces the reasons that the stone was understood at all as a combination of Napolean’s ambition and the genius of a child prodigy called Francois Champollion.

Another indeciherable script that remains so is the language used in the Indus Valley in 2600-199 BCE. It never had a Rosetta Stone equivalent(which had three languages imprinted on it, owing to which there was a breakthrough in understanding the script). Rongorongo, the script used at Easter Island; Cretan hieroglyphics; Proto-Elamite, a 5000-year-old ancient Iranian writing system, and markings used by Bulgarian woodcutters continue to surprise and even led to a tragic death in recent times
during the Cold War. To know more about this, read the essay.

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August 14, 2017
by Neelima
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Exile and Justice @ BYOB Party in June 2017 (Part 7)

I’m in the process of reading Roberto Bolaño’s Last Evenings on Earth, his first short-story collection in English. The stories have a dreamy quality to them and speak about nameless faceless characters, probably signifying the feeling of exile and conflict that the Chilean exiled diaspora is so familiar with. I particularly enjoyed his stories about failed writers who grapple with failings within themselves and on a lighter note with poor marketing skills. I was excited to find this story about Bolaño’s writing style and watch this video about the man himself.

While Bolaño explored how the lack of justice could fragment societies and individuals, Michael Sandel writes about what exactly justice means. Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? by Michael Sandel is a book based on a Harvard course taught by this esteemed professor. Sandel brings clarity to various issues in America including affirmative action, the conflict between utilitarianism and libertarianism, limits of the market, etc, and he links it to theories of justice by Aristotle, Jeremy Bentham, Immanuel Kant, etc.  “We need something like this pertaining to the Indian context,” Abhaya said.  Satish mentioned a surprising anecdote about the games he used to play as a thirteen-year-old, which included visiting an older intellectual friend who did very much what Sandel is doing in this book- outlining difficult cases and discussing possible solutions. Apurba, a lawyer herself, talked about a case similar to one that Abhaya had picked out of the book and she compared the situation to the one in the book and movie Life of Pi.

Abhaya also talked about the fictional representation of the paradox of utilitarianism in Ursula Le Guin’s powerful short story The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.

And with that, we have come to the end of an intense BYOB Party. Looking forward to the next one!

August 10, 2017
by Neelima
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Censorship in Soviet Russia @ Link Wanderlust

In the essay, The Writers who Defied Soviet Censors, Benjamin Ramm chronicles the story of samizdat, which is really the story of self-publishing in Russia vs state publishing. The author goes back in history to understand how information in the form of ‘political tracts, religious texts, novels, poetry, speeches and music’ was secretly circulated by anonymous writers. Russia, previously the USSR, has a long history of radical pamphlets, jailed writers and revolutionary zeal often quashed.

The complete process was summarised pithily by dissident Vladimir Bukovsky: “Samizdat: I write it myself, edit it myself, censor it myself, publish it myself, distribute it myself, and spend jail time for it myself”.

This essay is fascinating as it brings the present crises across countries into the spotlight- think Wikileaks and internet gags. The medium may change but the problem of censorship remains the same. Can a writer armed with nothing but her fingers change a narrative controlled by huge players? Impossible as it may seem, the writer tries.

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August 8, 2017
by Neelima
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Readers can’t Digest-Week 145 (2-Aug to 8-Aug)

1. Sam Shepard, Actor and Pulitzer-Winning Playwright, Is Dead at 73

2. Microsoft Adds Read Aloud Feature to Word

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3. David Leadbeater wins the first Amazon Kindle Storyteller award for self-published archaeological thriller, The Relic Hunters

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4. Sadiq Khan in £40k library funding pledge

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5. James Comey, casualty of Trump’s ‘Russia thing’, signs $2m book deal

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August 7, 2017
by Neelima
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Coffee Shops, Kabul and Elephant Whisperers @ BYOB Party in June 2017 (Part 6)

Ranjini got what one of the regulars of BYOB Party calls a light book. We can’t have a BYOB Party without that sort of book- light on the mind and easy to read. She picked up The Little Coffee Shop of Kabul, a book by Deborah Rodriguez, from Blossom Book House, Bangalore’s most well-known second-hand bookshop.

Although the title of the book seems ironical today as one would not associate coffee shops with Kabul, the author has worked in this part of the world and created a beauty salon to empower women living there (she’s also written a book about this called The Kabul Beauty School). War is the backdrop of her story but the characters she talks about are five women- Sunny, the proprietor of the cafe; Yazimina, a young pregnant woman; Candace, an American woman with an Afghan lover; Isabel, a journalist; and Halajan, a sixty-year-old, with a unique love affair and a difficult relationship with her son. The book can’t be categorized as chick lit as the situation that the women find themselves in is grave at times. It was interesting to read about Halajan’s relationship with society- she was a product of less conservative times and so she has her hair cut short and has a lover, all very embarrassing behavior as far as her son, a product of more conservative times, is concerned. The conversation veered to how different Afghanistan was once upon a time and how when the Russian tanks rolled in, the country rewrote its story.

Divya got a very different book called The Elephant Whisperer: Learning About Life, Loyalty and Freedom from a Remarkable Herd of Elephants by Lawrence Anthony, a conservationist. This is a true story of how the author was asked to accept a herd of rogue elephants at the Thila Thula game reserve in Zululand and in spite of the risks involves, he went ahead as this was the last chance for the herd to survive. Anthony writes about the relationships that he observed among the elephants and the relationship that he forged with the animals themselves.

Elephant lovers may like this link to a story by Jose Saramago now adapted into a play in Hindi about an elephant that trudged 3000 kms from Lisbon through Spain, the Alps and Vienna. Gajab Kahani tells the story of Solomon the elephant and Subhro, an imagined Bengali mahout.

Also, a story excerpt featuring an elephant, from Kanish Tharoor’s book Swimmer Among the Stars: Stories by Kanishk Tharoor.

 

 

August 3, 2017
by Neelima
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Are you Reading More or Less? @ Link Wanderlust

Has it happened to you that you were once an avid reader but find that now more and more you are just in a hurry and are not reading enough? This is what Philip Yancey talks about in The death of reading is threatening the soul. The author of the essay talks about how books define him and how he used to read three books a week. Now he finds that his commitment to reading is faltering and it’s not because of a dearth of books.

The Internet and social media have trained my brain to read a paragraph or two, and then start looking around. When I read an online article from the Atlantic or the New Yorker, after a few paragraphs I glance over at the slide bar to judge the article’s length. My mind strays, and I find myself clicking on the sidebars and the underlined links. Soon I’m over at CNN.com reading Donald Trump’s latest tweets and details of the latest terrorist attack, or perhaps checking tomorrow’s weather.

Sounds familiar?

The internet is giving too much of a dopamine rush and this prevents many potential readers from deep reading. Many successful entrepreneurs make an effort to read and they talk about it.

When asked about his secret to success, Warren Buffett pointed to a stack of books and said, “Read 500 pages like this every day. That’s how knowledge works. It builds up, like compound interest. All of you can do it, but I guarantee not many of you will…”

Tell us if you are reading more books than ever before or if it’s the other way round.

 

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August 1, 2017
by Neelima
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Readers can’t Digest-Week 144 (26-July to 1-Aug)

Man Booker Prize 2017 longlist

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Sherman Alexie’s mother’s ghost prompts him to cancel book tour

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Publishers in Japan Produce LGBT-Themed Books for Students

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Naiyer Masud, India’s enigmatic storyteller, dies

Game of Thrones: Winds of Winter could be out in 2018, says George RR Martin

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July 31, 2017
by Neelima
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Family Trees, Rocks and Monkey Trial @ BYOB Party in June 2017 (Part 5)

Aravind Chandramohan and Meera Iyer who are the co-founders of the heritage exploration company Carnelian spoke about the books they were immersed in at the time.

Aravind got a Kannada book called Vamshavriksha by S. L. Bhyrappa.  In Kannada, the title refers to the term family tree. This family saga spreads across three generations of the Rao and Shrotri households in Mysore.  Bhyrappa is well-respected in Kannada literature. This professor of philosophy is the recipient of many prestigious writing awards as well as the Padma Shri and many of his books have been translated and made into movies as well. Being a teacher of philosophy his books grapple with existential questions and deal with religious issues. He’s the Stephen King of Kannada literature, one of the readers said in the group, referring to his prolific output. Discussion of Kannada literature led to mention of  Ghachar Ghochar by Vivek Shanbhag and an anthropological study on the politics of the palaces of Mysore. Koshy’s, the popular restaurant and hangout on St. Marks Road, was also discussed as is inevitable in any discussion pertaining to Bangalore. Two camps emerged-one in favor of the conversation and discussion at this hotel with a history and the other more disillusioned camp who did not understand what magic Koshy’s had at all and why they had missed it.

Meera got a book called Indica: A Deep Natural History of the Indian Subcontinent by Pranay Lal. She was delighted to be gifted this book as it was the first of its kind in India. Hardly any books feature the natural history of the country or talk so passionately about our own rocks that we seldom admire for their age, but quarry instead. “The first few pages talk about the Nandi hills and the rocks at Lal Bagh. Can you guess how old they are?”

There was silence. No one was prepared to hear that the rock beneath our feet was three billion years old. Meera then educated us about various terms including the Dharwar Craton, the Deccan Traps, Gondwana and magma chambers. The book is comprehensive and filled with photographs, artwork and maps. Apart from a few editing issues and references that he has made primarily because he is a biochemist and not a geologist, Indica tells a wonderful tale of our geological creation history.  If more people who governed read books such as these, we would be on more solid ground.

 

The conversation ultimately deviated to belief systems and Meera, the storyteller that she is, told us about the Scopes trial. It was formally known as The State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes and commonly referred to as the Scopes Monkey Trial. John Scopes was accused of violating Tennessee’s Butler Act, which made it unlawful to teach human evolution in any state-funded school. The trial was the first of its sort to be broadcast on radio and threw light on the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy. Then as now, the US was sharply divided about theological truth and scientific fact.

Truth and belief are seldom friends.