July 10, 2017
by Neelima
2 Comments

Idyllic Hawaii and Mars on Antarctica @ BYOB Party in June 2017 (Part 2)

Guru is a science fiction aficionado but when he stumbled upon a book called Hawaii by James Michener, he was hooked. Michener won a Pulitzer prize for his first book, Tales of the South Pacific. In his book Hawaii, he starts with the geological formation of the islands, how the Polynesian seafarers made their way there and then how American missionaries arrived with organized religion. In Micheneresque style, he tells the story of a region through a generational saga.

Found an interview with James Michener. It’s worth listening to.

Another book about place was a book Madhukara got called Antarctica: An Intimate Portrait of the World’s Most Mysterious Continent. In the book, Gabrielle Walker who is armed with a PhD in chemistry writes lyrically and accessibly about the relationship that human beings have with the coldest, most inhospitable alien terrain on earth.  Antarctica’s geological history is unusual. While most of the single continent migrated upward, Antarctica was covered with ice and in some parts even have Dry Valleys, places where there is no ice at all as there has been no precipitation of any kind and for which reason they have been christened as Mars on Earth.

Antarctica has always been a back of the beyond place with an inflow of researchers only from the last century, following the Antarctic Treaty of 1961. She demystifies many pre-conceived notions about the South Pole. There are penguins there, of course, and they are very similar to bipeds in that they even hug! But penguins aside, Antarctica throws up many questions and has many stories to tell. Walker traces the journeys of the explorers who started it all including Scott, Shackleton and Amundsen. Walker talks about researching in the Antartica from a feminist perspective and in terms of male and female ratios, which is interesting.

She mentions a problem that this frozen terrain presents- mental health issues. Madness is extremely common in extremely cold places, a premise that has been used by Stephen King in his horror novel The Shining, so to go to  Antarctica, you need rigorous training. For Madhukara, the book reminded him of the precarious adventures of climbers in Everest. It opened up a whole range of questions from who owns resources in Antarctica (this was swampland and since dinosaurs existed, the chances of fossil fuels existing here are great) to the possibilities of space mining, the movie Elysium and whether you need a visa to go to the coldest place on earth.

The idea of several countries sharing space was reminiscent of The Treaty of Tordesillas signed by Portugal and Spain in 1494. According to this treaty, the lands to the east would belong to Portugal and the lands to the west to Spain. The conversation veered to claimants of geographical relics and ancient places. The dubious discovery of Machu Picchu and the bungling of the Archaeological Survey of India when it came to the way Stupas and other reliquaries with Buddha’s remains were lost were discussed, not to forget Elgin Marbles that did not belong to Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin, but was heritage belonging to the Acropolis, Athens. Some relics in Pompeii have also been removed from the scene and moved elsewhere. The past has been misappropriated many times in the name of heritage and exploration.

This was an intense session. More in Part 3.

 

 

July 6, 2017
by Neelima
0 comments

Failure and Writing @ Link Wanderlust

Writing a novel takes time. David Ebenbach talks about how it took him twenty-five years to write his first real novel. Though the book actually took two years, he’s referring to how long it took him to get there.

“Maybe the only reason I was able to write Miss Portland and have it be any good is because of all the work that happened before 2013—work that consisted of (among other things) seven bad, failed novels, work that went all the way back to 1990. Maybe each one of those failures was part of the process of learning how to write a novel. Learning, in fact, what a novel even is.”

This happens to every writer. The author describes how his first two novels were influenced by adolescent anxiety and the rest by other authors. He understands that ideas alone are not enough and neither is plot. A point comes after so many failures when you look at the manuscript and know that you are going to make it work. As the cliche goes, failure is often the bedrock of success.

Read Failing at Great Length: What I’ve Learnt from Writing Bad Novels by David Ebenbach.

writing GIF

 

 

 

July 3, 2017
by Neelima
0 comments

Damascus and Dalrymple @ BYOB Party in June 2017 (Part 1)

This time Meera Iyer co-hosted the BYOB Party with us. Meera is the Co-convener of INTACH Bangalore and Co-founder of Carnelian, a company that specializes in heritage tours. We traveled to her home in the quaint Uttarahalli, a suburb in Bangalore. True to the spirit of heritage, the BYOB Party kicked off with some history.

Apurba couldn’t resist picking up a book by Dalrymple from Blossom Book House on Church Street (if you live in Bangalore and you love books, this is where you would go). In his book, From the Holy Mountain: A Journey In The Shadow of Byzantium, Dalrymple speaks about countries with glorious histories, now under the siege of war. With a historian’s eye for detail and a storyteller’s wit, Dalrymple takes the reader on a journey through the Byzantine world, following in the footsteps of a monk called John Moschos who had written a book called Spiritual Meadow. Dalrymple has written In Xanadu using a similar premise, following the footsteps of Marco Polo. Moschos’s grand spiritual project involved saving the wisdom of the sages. Islam was making its inroads and Christianity was subtly fleeing the Middle East. It was a revelation to Apurba that Christianity was as eastern a religion as Islam and Judaism.

Dalrymple writes a detailed account of the civil war in Turkey, the ruins of war in Beirut and the tension in the West Bank. He starts in Anatolia in Turkey, travels through Syria and finally arrives at Jerusalem.

 

“Nobody knows these things,” Apurba said. “Even friends who have visited Turkey do not know about the Armenian Genocide in 1915.” Dalrymple describes how unIslamic architecture has systematically lost out to competition. Anyone interested in the Byzantine Empire, its past and present, will love this book.

You might like this video where Dalrymple talks about his earlier travels through these regions.

Jaya mentioned a book called Three Daughters by Consuelo Saah Baehr, a fictional saga of the loves and lives of three generations of Palestinian Christian women. The book was eye-opening as it revealed the fact that Arab identity was not necessarily always Islamic.

 

June 29, 2017
by Neelima
0 comments

Author Pictures and the Reader @ Link Wanderlust

Just when you think that nothing more could be written about books, you find a story called How Author Photos Change the Way we Read. This story by Dustin Illingworth speaks about a habit that all readers have of glancing at the dust jacket of a book in search of the author’s face. If you love the writing, that face speaks to you more and you feel a strange longing, as though by looking at the author’s face, you own the book a new way.

So Illingworth speaks of famous authors whose photos have captivated the world. Take Virginia Woolf, Kafka, Plath, Kerouac, and so many others.

“But when we let our gaze linger on the photographed faces of our literary heroes, how much of what we feel can be attributed to readerly intuition—and how much to fantasy? Affixed to the backs of book jackets, touched and smudged and gazed at longingly (or enviously, as it were), the image of the author has become an underappreciated accessory to the ritual of modern reading. These photographs, with the drama inherent to a human face, offer up a kind of ready-made narrative potential that we seize on, often before we’ve read a single page. We take in the glowing eyes, the spectral hands, the starched collar, the frozen smile, and in that encounter a feeling—a story—begins to unspool in our minds. That reflexive flash becomes a kind of echo that stays with us when the actual reading begins, a conversation between text and image, image and text. If ours is a culture of visual primacy, is it any wonder the photos of our authors come to inhabit the texts they write?

black and white tea virginia woolf fale GIF

 

 

June 26, 2017
by Neelima
0 comments

Vultures and Feminism @ BYOB Party in April 2017 (Part 8)

Sudharsan spoke about Joby Josephs’ Feast of Vultures: The Hidden Business of Democracy in India. The writer is an investigative journalist and the book is an expose of the famous business houses of the country, for which the author is facing some legal flak. The story is about how corruption is an integral thread of the economy in India and how fixers make things possible in spite of the red tape. This is a blessing and a curse at the same time. So while big businesses flourish in the nation, something is rotten in the system. The book is an important read for those who want to understand how India works today and how much needs to be changed, going ahead.

Abhaya read Seeing like a Feminist by Nivedita Menon, a professor at JNU. He found this read at Zubaan Books. He believes that book is a more systematic Indian rendition of what feminism really means here and how it changed from being about the victim to being about agents of change. The book talks about a variety of things including the history of feminism in India, surrogacy, LGBT rights, sexual violence and lactating fathers.

Some essential feminist reads were discussed including The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir and the Golden Notebook by Dorris Lessing. Mention was made of M.T. Vasudevan Nair’s Malayalam novel Nalukettu, a novel that is set within the matrilineal confines of Nair society. The prospect of property being passed on from mother to daughter seemed unusual to the readers at the group. though it was concluded that though the matrilineal system has created a more emancipated concept of womanhood in Kerala, male domination is no alien concept there.

And with that, we come to the end of this session.

 

 

 

June 22, 2017
by Neelima
0 comments

Is English Normal? @ Link Wanderlust

Have you ever thought that English is not a normal language? John McWhorter, professor of linguistics and American studies at Columbia University, seems to think so. He comes to this conclusion by comparing the Anglo-Saxon language with other languages.

Some reasons that make English so odd are that it excludes many features that language usually displays like applying gender to nouns, third person singular present tense peculiarities,  the usage of ‘do’ which is actually very Celtic, and the fact that it has accommodated thousands of loan words from various languages. The essay is humorous and written with the understanding and insight of a linguist. For instance, McWhorter is able to identify how the Scandinavians actually spoiled Old English and in the process made the language easier.

“Thus the story of English, from when it hit British shores 1,600 years ago to today, is that of a language becoming delightfully odd. Much more has happened to it in that time than to any of its relatives, or to most languages on Earth.”

It’s not often that you get to read a humorous piece on the history of the English language. Don’t miss reading this one! Here it is: English is not Normal.

fire break noise woods f GIF