Sophie's World- Book Review

An amazing book, if you have the slightest interest in things philosophical. I came across the book in a Pondicherry boutique hotel room -yes, they had books in each room. There was also a common living room/kitchen- here's a pic. (Wildflowers of Walden's the name of this place)

The book is about a girl discovering various schools of thought -mostly philosophical and religious, but also about inventions and discoveries and much more- through conversations with an older man. It's written in an engaging style (translated from Norwegian, I think), and I was hooked until I read all of it.

Book Review-The Evolution of Everything by Matt Ridley

I am in the middle of a fascinating book about how everything has evolved, and will evolve. No, it does not tell you what will be the end result, but says that it won't be planned. Instead, it will evolve as a result of various events, pulls, pressures and so on. And this covers every aspect of life as we know it.

Almost anything you can think of is covered, not just our evolution from a Darwinian standpoint. Culture, religion, morality, civilisation, institutions, the Law, and almost everything. The central argument of the author is that you can only achieve so much through planning, and free enterprise actually works better than control. Human action helps, but design, planning,...very little.

All you control freaks out there, you need to take a chill pill, if what he argues is even half-correct. For instance, he finds that the Epicurean principles espoused by an ancient author were suppressed a long time because they were inconvenient to, and contradicted the Church. The author's writings were accidentally found and propagated to an extent (or at least were out in print) in the fourteenth century.

Many interesting fields bound together by a common thread. There are references to another book I had read a long time ago, Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, about our evolution.

I can't wait to read the rest of it. See you later.

GK goes to PK's planet

We recently were visited by Mr. PK, an alien from somewhere, according to the movie PK starring Aamir Khan. What is likely to be discovered if we send our guy-let's call him GK- to PK's planet?

Nothing, except the inhabitants, and maybe carrot farms.

No clothes, hence no FTV channel (its USP doesn't exist)

No fights, hence no need for dialogues such as "(Hindi) Main tera khoon pee jaoonga, kaminey"

No religion, and therefore, no salvation

No love, and hence no hate

No lying, and therefore no facebook

No paper- only transmission of knowledge through holding hands

No God-men, and no discourses by God-men. A few more TV channels gone!

No spitting, and hence no need for a Cleanliness Drive, by whatever name

No political parties, and therefore no Arnab Goswami.

PK- Film Review

It's watchable, and fun in parts, but tries your patience at times. But if it comes to a toss-up between the films of the three Khans today (leaving out Saif), I would go with Amir. There was a time when I would have gone with Shah Rukh, but sadly, that time was around DDLJ's first release- maybe even upto Kal Ho Na Ho. Anyway, back to P.K.

Some of the gags are pretty good, and so are the cinematic twists in the tale of an alien trying to understand this gola (sphere) and its denizens. The focus of the story is largely on the purveyors of religion who, in the name of God, manipulate the masses- sometimes giving them Hope, not a bad thing as one of the characters in the film says, defending himself.

Which is fine, and makes a lot of sense, in these times of the discredited Babas/Godmen of whom there is no dearth in our country. My major problem with the film is that it drags very badly in the first half- more precisely, in the second half of the first half. Had that been tightly edited, the impact of the final product would have been far better. It also does not help that the theme is similar to Oh My God, and that the Amir character looks and feels like Ranbir in Barfi, giving you a feeling of Deja Vu. Boman Irani seems underutilized, particularly as we now know what he is capable of (thanks to Rajkumar Hirani). Anushka is fairly good, though I liked her better in her earlier avatar/look. The Godman is competent. The cameo of a guy playing Shankar bhagwan is excellent! The climax is handled well, going live on a talk-show.

Watch it, if only to make a statement against the crap being (otherwise) regularly dished out on our screens.

Does He Know a Mother's Heart- Book Review

This is a book by Arun Shourie. Known as an investigative journalist once, here he investigates religion as we know it, and he uses a suffering child- his own as the benchmark for all that he discusses. Hence the title, that is inspired by the encounter that he and his wife had with J. Krishnamurty the teacher-philosopher.

His investigations lead him to some very useful territory, by way of defining what the various religions say, why they may be saying it, and what we might conclude from it. The territory covered is vast, from Christianity, Islam to Hinduism and Buddhism, and some science, particularly neuroscience. Makes for good reading and pondering. I may continue to ponder.

The best sections are a summary of his conclusions at the end of a chapter, sharing his own interpretations of what the sages have said- in particular, Ramakrishna Paramahansa and Ramana Maharshi. The soul, the maya or otherwise of the world around us, the Self, the mind and its games, the roles played by thoughts, and efforts to rid ourselves of all these, are dealt with nicely.

His son suffered from cerebral palsy, but gave new meaning to his and his wife's lives, in many ways. It is an upbeat book, not drowning in self pity. I would recommend it. There may be a lot of takeaways.