Oh Boy

OVERLEAF 36

Growing up, my favourite author was Roald Dahl. For a whole season his George’s Marvellous Medicine accompanied me into the toilet every day. I never tired of the story, in which young George is left alone at home with his nasty, selfish, suspicious and sharp-tongued grandmother. He’s been told to give her her medicine, a foul brown concoction which is supposed to make her better but never does — in George’s eyes, anyway. So he decides to make his own medicine.

Farsi-ghted

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It could hardly be said that Delhi, this imperial capital, is rich in libraries. There must be fewer library books here than there are residents, which cannot be true of any other major world capital. Apart from the few large collections, including those at the Parliament Library (inaccessible to ordinary mortals — do MPs read?), Delhi Public Library, Delhi University (DU), JNU, the rest of Delhi’s libraries are relative midgets.

But it’s a David and Goliath thing. Some midgets have an impact disproportionate to their size.

To Errol, divine

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By the time I closed the book at half past three in the morning and one third of the way through, I was all aglimmer. Partly it may have been sleep deprivation, but mostly it was Errol Flynn. You see, I was reading his memoirs, titled My Wicked, Wicked Ways. And you are reading these words on the centenary of his birth, in Hobart, Tasmania, the large triangular island off the southeastern corner of Australia.

Palace of allusions

OVERLEAF 33

A TV ad for home security systems a few years ago showed the youthful father of a good-looking nuclear family turning on the home alarm at night. As he did so, from the keypad a host of 0s and 1s spilled out in all directions across the wall, around corners and onto ceilings, until all surfaces of the house, and thus the family within, were protected by this flickering binary mesh. It was sufficiently disquieting to remain lodged in the memory — and I was reminded of it recently, while reading about new discoveries at the Alhambra, the castle-palace of Granada in Spain.

Smokestacks are hot

BS blog 5

Surveying the local skyline, such as it is, from atop my favourite local pedestrian railway bridge, one thing is clear: smokestacks are hot.

London crawling

There’s too much going on in Meghnad Desai’s debut political thriller

If you can get past the first dozen pages of this book, you’ll probably keep going to the end. In the very first scene, old-school lefty journalist Ian wakes up to BBC Radio’s breakfast news talk show hosted by James Naughtie and John Humphrys — during which Gideon Crawford, the secretary of state for Scotland, will face tough questioning over the government’s approach to the forthcoming elections to the Scottish Parliament, at which the Scottish Nationalists will take on the ruling Labour Party, in power in Westminster after many years and with a sizeable majority, thanks to their young and dashing new PM, Harry White, whose obituary Ian must go to work today and bring up to date, just in case…

You see?

Placebook

A handbook of Delhi’s modern architecture casts familiar buildings in a new, collective light

Few speak of Delhi’s architectural heritage beyond what the sultans, badshahs and British built. Architect Rahul Khanna and photographer Manav Parhawk set out to challenge this paradigm. Many of the 47 masterpieces of Delhi’s modern architecture they describe in this slim handbook are institutional buildings and embassies, but there are also homes, places of worship, memorials… An e-mail interview with Rahul Khanna.

Jailwords

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In the year of the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre, one unusual voice has escaped the Chinese clampdown. The memoirs of Zhao Ziyang, ex-premier and general secretary of the Communist Party of China at the time of the “June 4 incident” (as it is called in China), were published last month in Hong Kong and elsewhere. The book is moving up the bestseller lists.

Peer behind the scenes

A glimpse of life in the political village of Westminster

Dead on Time
Meghnad Desai
HarperCollins India
pp 256

At 1.20 pm on the fateful single day in the late 1990s that comprises the timespan of this political thriller, British prime minister Harry White is sitting down to lunch with Matt Drummond, a newspaper billionaire, in Drummond’s suite at the Ritz in London. In order to be here, the PM has cancelled at very short notice a lunch with members of his Commission on the New Millennium — including the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Chief Rabbi, a Duke, a “fiery Black poet”, two professors and a “token woman”.

Instant books

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There’s really no room for revolution in the design of a book. Makers and users — not professional designers — have perfected its form and features over millennia. (The real revolution, if we’re looking for one, was the invention of the alphabet by the Phoenicians 5,000 years ago.) After all, a book is basically a text-bearing surface, organised for convenience.

Art and Adam

A philosophical novel of utopias — for “young adults”

What a fantastic book this is! But you have to read it twice to know that. Repetitio est mater studiorum, after all, as Arthur Schopenhauer reminds us in an essay on reading, before going on to explain that “Any kind of important book should immediately be read twice, partly because one grasps the matter in its entirety the second time, and only really understands the beginning when the end is known; and partly because in reading it the second time one’s temper and mood are different, so that one gets another impression; it may be that one sees the matter in another light.” Everything he says here is valid for this book.

Rank weeds

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One of my favourite columnists, David Brooks of the New York Times, this week wrote that CEOs need not bother to read novels. In the column, titled “In Praise of Dullness”, Brooks cited a study according to which, he says, successful CEOs are “humble, self-effacing, diligent and resolute souls” — dependable plodders. The readerly advantages of “greater psychological insight, a feel for human relationships, a greater sensitivity toward their own emotional chords” are useless for CEOs.

Class difference

Old warriors make bad rulers in our time of change. A new kind of politician is in the making

Smart rulers of old knew what they needed: ministers who knew the work and the details and could keep the administration running and revolt at bay. This would leave the king free to view the big picture and set the chief goals (and to enjoy himself while he lasted). This was especially true of newcomer kings, such as the early Muslim rulers of India, who started with a clean slate in a strange, but very rich, land.

‘I will teach you to be rich’

Self-help books in the business slowdown

It’s time to make money — for those who dispense advice, that is. The recession has left a few people without jobs, and many more uneasy about theirs. The smarter ones are thinking long-term, beyond this current slump: they want to know how to make themselves indispensable, and to enhance their work skills in case they do have to move on. The most adventurous are thinking beyond jobs altogether, to becoming entrepreneurs in their own right.

Not everybody has the confidence to take that bold step, and few indeed can afford to go back to B-school. So into the breach step the retail advice-providers, the army of authors and publishers of how-to business books.

Rubber duck

Looking high and low for NACO condoms at New Delhi Railway Station

“My kingdom for a condom,” I muttered, dodging through the crowds outside New Delhi Railway Station, my eyes raking the walls for the bright red boxes. With much fanfare last year the National Aids Control Organisation (NACO) had installed 1,500 condom vending machines (CVMs) at railway stations, public toilets and bus stands across Delhi (”at several vantage points”, said one newspaper, unhelpfully) — places frequented by itinerants and the less well-off. Across India, 11,025 were installed. Now, on the busy Ajmeri Gate side of this station, I couldn’t see even one.