Ladies Coupe

This is the first time that I tried Anita Nair. I had read such glowing praise for her writing that when I actually read one of her books I was quite disappointed. The subject matter was mildly relevant, but I am not sure if a whole novel was required to answer the question that the author poses at the outset: "Can a woman live without a man to support her?".

The storyline is pretty straightforward: the protagonist,  an orthodox Tam girl, omits getting married because she was too busy supporting her family. The family soon becomes busy living their own lives, and she is left feeling lonely and miserable. One fine morning, she amasses the courage to defy tradition and venture out, looking for an answer to the million dollar question. She takes a train journey to Kanyakumari from Bangalore Cantt., and travels in the Ladies Coupe. She meets four other women in the coupe, and elicits their perspectives on the matter based on their own experiences. Her journey that night apparently provides her with the answer - and while I might be wrong, from her actions, what I understood was that her conclusion was that women cannot live without men to support them.

I think the writer intended the opposite effect, though - I cannot imagine a woman writer of fame doling out anything else. What got me however was that the protagonist decides to call an old flame whom she had almost gotten married to right at the end of the book. Why do that, if the conclusion was that women can do just fine without men?

What I liked best about the book was perhaps the familiarity of the settings. It is set in South India, mostly centered around places I am familiar enough with, narrating stories that I can relate to.

What I did not find was mastery - I found myself getting bored every now and then while reading through some parts of the book. Perhaps the subject was not really worthy of a novel and should have been limited to just a short story to have more punch. I also think that the subject matter is somewhat outdated, given where women are in society at the moment. I think such appearances only mattered among the middle and upper classes of society to begin with, and they have mostly moved beyond such concepts by now. Perhaps this is why I found the book boring. If the fundamental premise is something that doesnt hold your attention, it is unsurprising that the details put one to sleep.

I wont be reading much of Anita Nair for a while. 

Steve Jobs

A few weeks ago, I was searching for a book I could read on a six hour flight. I have an irrational fear of flying, and find it nearly impossible to sleep on flights. The only way to keep myself calm is to watch some dud movie or read a book. Originally, my plan was to read Anita Nair's Ladies Coupe. However, when the time finally came, I realized that I did not have the patience for a novel. Thats how I chose this book.

It was the perfect antidote for my flying-phobia. In fact I was so engrossed with the story that I hardly noticed the flight. Walter Isaacson clearly knows how to pace a biography. Or maybe Steve Jobs is a really interesting human being whose life story has its own force field. Whatever the case, I found myself reading it up throughout the length of the flight. And I was still reading it on my return flight with the same enthusiasm. It was a really interesting narrative set in chronological order, starting with Jobs' birth, schooling, college, and the story of how he built Apple along with Wozniak.

I already knew the main features of the story - or at least I thought I knew most of it, but found out a lot of the details when I read this book. It changed my perspective on a number of topics - on closed vs open systems, on copying original ideas, on the importance of design, on lying, even.

Originally, I had thought that Microsoft was the "copying company", and that Apple was the "real creator". This book however indicates that things were a little more nuanced than that. The original creators of GUIs was Xerox. They had developed it, but had failed to see how it could be used on a personal computer. They demoed it to Steve Jobs, who used the idea and packaged it much better and brought out the Macintosh with the first mass marketed GUIs. Windows came out a little later, doing pretty much the same thing. So the argument that Apple "created it anew" isnt really true. The idea happened prior to Apple, but them implemented it well.

This is a theme that would follow throughout Apple's history - they would identify products with new ideas that were implemented poorly, and imagine it anew with much better design and implementation and capture everyone's fascination. Thats what happened with the iPod. Sony had a walkman out years earlier, but Jobs came along and took a crack at it and produced the iPod. The same thing happened with the iPhone and the iPad - those were both devices that existed already. However, Jobs approached it from a user's perspective and designed it from the ground up to be a product that he would want to use, and the results clearly were much better than anything that existed in the market at the point.

Jobs' passion for design is something that the book deals with, a lot. It talks about how he would force design and redesign of the products until it looked just right. Apparently he forced the engineers to make sure that the innards of a Mac looked beautifully arranged, just because he liked good design everywhere, despite the fact that the innards would never be seen by the customer. He also forced them to not ship until the product was just right - which says a lot about his commitment to quality. What I found most strange however was how his sense of good design affected his personal life - apparently he could never furnish his apartment because he was unable to find furniture that he thought was well designed. Even when he was fighting cancer, he apparently insisted on changing his oxygen mask to a different one 5 times until he got one that he thought was designed well. It shows a passion for beauty and design that he does not because he wants to make a living, but because thats the only way he knows how to be.

One of the surprises to me about Jobs was what the book refers to as his "reality distortion field". In the earlier parts of the book, I thought it was just a fancy name for lying. Apparently Jobs indulged in it quite a bit especially when he was negotiating with people. However, by the time I finished the book, I realized why the author called it a "reality distortion field" : Jobs possibly really believed whatever lies he was saying. When the liar does not realize he is lying, can that really be called lying?

But perhaps the biggest revelation to me was the relationship that Gates and Jobs shared. I did not realize that they respected each other. My impression was that each thought the other was a bozo. Maybe they did think that for a while. However, as time passed by and they seem to both have realized that the other had done some things right. Gates had chosen open systems that made Windows really popular. He had to give up control on his systems though, and that resulted in much of the flak that Microsoft has taken over the years. Jobs had chosen total control of his system, and this resulted in a much better user experience. However, the number of users for Macnitoshes were never very high. It is the iPod, iPhone and iPad revolution that made apple what it is today.

Whats fascinating about Jobs is that he made such significant contributions to so many different industries. It included personal computers, music industry, animated movies, mobile phones and even publishing. Most people are lucky to make a dent in just one area. He apparently managed to make a dent in the universe, like how he wanted.

The book made me appreciate Apple's products a lot more. I used to think of them as high priced stuff that white people liked. Now that I see some of the philosophy behind it, and because I have used some of those products myself and seen non tech savvy folks use them, I realize that they are designed better and are more intuitive to use.

Nice read. Although I havent read Ladies Coupe so far, I think this was a far better choice for a flight :)

An Ordinary Man's Guide to Empire

One day, I happened to watch a talk / book reading that Arundhati Roy gave at MIT along with Noam Chomsky. I dont remember how I came across it, but I listened to the whole thing, and it left quite an impression. I think I first came to know of Noam Chomsky through the Hindu, which used to publish some of his political views. Later during my undergrad years, when I took a course on Finite Automata and Formal languages, I learnt that the same person had done a lot of work on grammars. I enjoyed that course, and I later decided to take that up as the subject of my research - but that is another story and it has nothing to do with Chomsky or Roy.

Chomsky is no ordinary professor. He is a thinker - someone with an ability to provide a fresh perspective on reality, someone who is capable of leading a society's thoughts forward. Perhaps philosopher is a more appropriate term. And it is in this capacity that I think he has contributed the most - I am not belittling his contributions to theoretical CS in any way; that has been enormous, but his political contributions are perhaps even more important, since theoretical CS continues to be of interest only to a few. And it is in the same capacity that Arundhati Roy has a role to play in Indian politics. Voices of reason like these are necessary in a country whose political climate seems to get worse by the day. It helps us get our bearings right and keeps us moving forward instead of becoming a regressive country with a retarded religious sensibility that appears to have come straight out of the middle ages.

But this is a review of the book, and its not about what I think of philosophy. After watching that talk, I bought this book. Its a small book, doesnt take too long to read from cover to cover. It is a collection of essays / talks that she gave at various points in the run up to the Iraq war. She criticizes the US govt mercilessly, in a way only she can. That was well deserved though. She also talks about unrest in various parts of India - such as the naxal movement, the confrontations that adivasis have with the governments every now and  then and of displaced people from the Narmada valley. She sees a common root cause in all these strifes and advocates their rights, which is something the mainstream often forgets, just because they happen to be mainstream.

In the past I have wondered how writers justified their jobs. I always found it useful to write - nothing clears up your thinking the way writing can. However, writing as a profession seemed frivolous to me - I never looked at the art of story telling as important to culture. Reading books written by someone like Arundhati Roy changes one's outlook.

Typical Arundhati Roy style writing. I like her writing, so I am going to say it was a great read.