State Of Fear by Michael Crichton, HarperCollins Publishers, 603 pages.

“The United States of America is an international pariah, isolated from the rest of the world and justifiably despised because we failed to sign the Kyoto Protocol to attack a global problem”, says one of the characters in Michael Crichton’s new book State Of Fear. This is countered by one of the main characters in the book with the statement that Kyoto protocol does plan to reduce warming by 0.04 degrees Celsius in 100 years. Right now we cannot even predict weather beyond five days accurately and how do we know what’s going to happen in 100 years.
In the book the villain is Nicholas Drake, the head of National Environmental Resource Fund who thinks that people have lost interest in environmental causes and need to be shocked into action. For this he plans some eco-terrorism with a group called Environmental Liberation Front. Fighting them are George Morton, a billionaire philanthropist, Peter Evans, a junior attorney, and John Kenner an M.I.T professor who works for the National Security Intelligence Agency.
After the heroes and villains have been introduced, they embark on their well choreographed behaviors. The villains try to blow up things and the heroes reach just in time to foil it. For foiling the terrorist activities, our heroes follow the Dan Brown design pattern which says that there has to be clues to the actual locations of terrorism which the heroes will decode with their brains and Internet. The Dan Brown pattern also says that even though the villains know that the hero has decoded the location, they will still go ahead with their plans. During this dance, we are given lectures on how much we trust all these global warming advocates who themselves have no idea on how the weather changes.
Crichton’s books are mostly techno-thrillers. Prey was about nanotechnology, Timeline was about time travel and Airframe was about the airline industry. This book questions the blind faith that people have in the global warming theory and Crichton quotes several research papers in footnotes to lend authenticity to his arguments.
The book does manage to raise awareness on the global warming data and on the agenda of the NGOs who claim to work for environmental causes which is refreshing. After reading this book, you will look at global warming with skepticism. As a thriller it is predictable and the characters are two-dimensional. This book is not as good as Jurassic Park or even Prey or Timeline, but better than Airframe.

In the 19th century Britain moved from the empire where the sun did not set to one which had lost all its power and a number of factors have been cited for this. A book by Anirudh Deshpande examines the British Military strategy during its age of decline.

Besides inadequate capital investment, the armed forces also suffered from a shortage of officers. In the inter-war period, young Britons were not willing to join the army. And racism and insecurity prevented the British government from allowing a large number of Indians into the commissioned ranks.
The Indian army remained a regiment-centric and frontier-oriented force during World War II. Deshpande asserts that the raj had to recruit the urban

A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, Broadway, 560 pages

Popular travel writer Bill Bryson got curious about the world one day and wondered – How do scientists measure the size of the earth or its distance from the sun ?. How do they how old this planet is ? Why does the salinity of the ocean stay the same ? Pondering over these questions, he figured that he did not know much about science. So he started a quest to understand these issues and wrote the book A Short History of Nearly Everything in the process.

So this book covers, as the title says the history of nearly
everything – physics, chemistry, biology, geology, paleontology,
quantum physics, astronomy, and natural history to name a few fields. We go from the first
moments of the big bang to the most recent fossil discoveries. We go from
the life of sub atomic particles to the life of dinosaurs. The
information presented in the book comes from Bryson’s vociferous reading of  material from
science journals to popular books and interviews with scientists working in the
field.

Writing a book on science and making it interesting for 500 odd pages
is no easy task and I have to say, Bryson has done it well. Once I read an interview
with him where he said that when he was a travel writer he observed that
not even your spouse wants to read your writing. So his solution was to intersperse
the narrative with humor and if you have read his books, A Walk in the Woods or
In a Sunburned Country   you know what that
means. In this book he laces the scientific developments with the life of the
people who made the discoveries.

The result is that you end up knowing a lot more about
famous people and a lot of people whom the science books have left out. You get
to know about their passions, jealousies, quirks, influences and
motivations. But sometimes he gets too obsessed with trivia (French Chemist
Antoine Lavoisier had 13000 beakers in his lab, Max Plank’s son was caught in a
conspiracy for murdering Hitler, Darwin fathered ten children). But then a
justification for these hooks are the fact that only few people are interested
in all braches of science discussed, I for one like Physics and hate Biology.
These trivia and Bryson’s humor got me across the biology chapters without
getting bored.

If you are
interested in science and lot of trivia, this is the book for you.

I have been watching so many Hindi movies and at the end of each one I wonder, “Which brain dead person wrote this one ?”. But then I read this note from Suketu Mehta in National Geographic and was happy that this story did not get made into a movie. 

Hanging out with Shah Rukh Khan was great fun. He told me about the kind of bizarre scripts people propose to him. In one story idea given to him by a politician, Shah Rukh’s character dies. But there is no human body available for reincarnation. So he is born again as a dog. After nine months, he falls in love with a woman.

The politician had spent hundreds of thousands of rupees buying puppies and training them. He had many books about dogs on his table. I asked Shah Rukh if he was expected to act as the dog. In answer, he scratched his ear rapidly with his paw. [On Assignment from Bollywood]

Maximum City : Bombay Lost and Found by Suketu Mehta, Knopf, 560 pages

The first story in Roma Eterna is about a Greek ambassador visiting Rome and being taken on a tour of the Roman underworld by the youngest prince. Like this prince, Suketu Mehta takes us on a tour of the Mumbai underworld to meet people whom you may not encounter in your daily life. These people open up to him like they are standing in a confession box and thus we get to hear a Shiv Sena man explaining how it is to kill a Muslim, a gangster explaining what he does after shooting a victim and one of the top cops explaining why they do encounters where suspects are just murdered without trial.
Mehta lived in Mumbai and then moved to New York and various other cities before coming back to Mumbai to write a book about the city.
It is not just the unknown people who open up to him, but also people like Bal Thackerey, Chotta Shakeel and Sanjay Dutt. The portrait of Mumbai is drawn through the lives of these people. In one incident actress Preity Zinta is on an outdoor shoot and asks Suketu Mehta to point out some gangsters who have killed others. This curiosity about the lives of people who violate law is the underlying thread which connects most of the stories in the book.
There are ironies: Director Vidhu Vinod Chopra who thinks that Indians have screwed up Kashmir makes a politically correct movie on the issue titled Mission Kashmir with Suketu Mehta as the co-writer. Vinod Chopra also places himself as a brilliant film maker who has to make movies for what he calls ulloo audience.
Then there are more ironies. The star of Mission Kashmir, Sanjay Dutt, plays a cop but was arrested for illegally possessing an AK-47. Rakesh Roshan, father of Hritik Roshan who plays the terrorist was shot by actual gangsters. During the filming of the interrogation scene with Sanjay Dutt, the actual cop who arrested Sanjay Dutt turns up at the set. The Shiv Sena member who murdered a Muslim (because he was a Muslim), now befriends Muslims. Bal Thackerey who is out to ban Valentine’s Day celebrations, invites Michael Jackson to his home and sees no fault in that.
In this book, the author is not a distant spectator, but gets involved with the characters in the book. He gets gangsters to visit his hotel room and speak out their minds. He befriends a beer bar girl and travels with her when she is meeting her father after a long time. Sometimes these incidents seem so unrealistic to be true – or too filmi.
Mumbai is not just a city of law violators, there are people who struggle to make a living. People who travel from Virar to Churchgate everyday, go back home, sleep and do it again the next day. These people age faster, but their lives do not have tales worth writing. You will not find many such people in this book.
This book will shock the hell out of you and also this must be one of the few non-fiction page turners I have read (Into Thin Air is another). Mehta has done wonderful research and gets us involved with the lives of so many criminals and glamorous people at great personal risk. The narrative is gripping and the characters we encounter are so different that the book holds your attention till the end. Most of the tales are sensationalist and there is a tendency to romanticise the gangsters (They have families and they pray and some are even vegetarians). But this is a book on Mumbai unlike any other and is a excellent read.
Related Links: Terri Gross interviews Suketu Mehta, Sandeep’s Review of Maximum City

• Harold and Kumar go to White Castle: Asians Rock! If Americans can do gross stuff in American Pie, so can Asians. Harold is a Korean Investment Banker and Kumar is an Indian, who set out to get some White Castle Burgers after getting high. During the night they encounter so many wierd characters and do such wierd stuff. Very funny. Sepia Mutiny writes that a sequel might be on the way.
• Papparazi: Revenge dramas always hold your attention and this one is no different. A famous film actor and his family is harassed by the papparazi and when the family gets hurt by them, the actor decides to take things into his own hands and give the papparazi a taste of their own medicine. This movie had my attention till the end.
• The Making of the Mahatma: A young M K Gandhi arrived in South Africa to spend a month for a petty case and ended up staying there for almost 21 years. In those 21 years, many incidents such as racism and the plight of indentured Indians moved him so much that he started fighting for their rights. It was there that he first tried passive resistance to win rights for Indians. This movie also goes into his troubled relations with his son, the fights he had with Kasturba over his idealistic views as well as his attempts to resist conversion attempts by Christian pastors. This movie made by Shyam Benegal stars Rajit Kapur as Gandhji and Pallavi Joshi as Kastuba. Excellent movie.
• Mystic River: A tragic tale with a gripping narration. As actor/directors like Dev Anand seem to be losing their sanity with old age, Clint Eastwood seems to be getting better and better with each movie. This movie also has wonderful perfomances by Sean Penn and Tim Robbins.
• The Village: M. Night Shyamalan’s torture movie. I got bored and slept off before the end.

I have found travelogues to be more interesting when they have an angle to it. For example Walking the Bible is a journey from Egypt to Jerusalem along the path followed by Moses. Chasing Che is a motorcycle trip along the route that Che Guevera took. Jaya Ganga: In Search of the River Goddess is travel from the origins to the end of river Ganga and Chasing the monsoon is a journey of a man following the path of monsoons in India. All those are books I have enjoyed reading and now along similar lines there is a new book Ten Thousand Miles Without a Cloud by Shuyun Sun which follows the path taken by Huen Tsang, the Chinese pilgrim who toured India during in the 7th century.

Instead of trekking in the neighbourhood, however, she had a grander idea. As a history student, she had been fascinated by Huien Tsang, not because he is one of the most popular figures in Chinese folklore, but because so little is known about him.
The monk who travelled to India in the 7th century is generally regarded as a foolish man in China, as his more popular fictional self, the Monkey King, protagonist of one of China

Pankaj Mishra has a new book titled An End to Suffering : The Buddha in the World. This book is about understanding the life and time of Buddha.

Mishra presents these concepts simply and clearly. He also lends them dramatic immediacy, tying them closely to specific events and places in the Buddha’s life, highlighting the arguments and counter-arguments that they provoked at the time. At every turn, he draws parallels between the social problems of the Buddha’s era and the social and political torments of today.
He remains a skeptical Buddhist, though, if he is a Buddhist at all. He admits to finding the Buddha’s dialogues “long-winded and repetitious,” with “little of the artistry so evident in Plato.” As a political force, Buddhism comes across as, at best, benevolent but ineffectual.
In the end, it’s hard to know exactly where Mishra stands as he circles back on himself and heads off to remote locales. Visiting a Zen meditation center in Northern California, where an old American friend has become a monk, he feels awkward. A prayer is recited. He finds the words incomprehensible. The rituals annoy him. “I couldn’t but feel their irrelevance to the world I was growing up in,” he writes.
Mishra’s journey of a thousand miles leads him back to the beginning. For him, it seems, there is no end to suffering. [Mishra defines Buddhism, but he doesn’t embrace it]

We have been fascinated by Buddha for a while for developing “set of introspective techniques designed to make the suffering individual more self-aware, and through this self-awareness to move systematically beyond the self and its vain strivings toward a state he called nirvana”, and doing all this without any divine intervention. This should be an interesting book to read.

This weekend the San Jose Mercury news had a feature on the top fiction and non-fiction books and then today Forum on KQED had a call in show with book recommendations from the listeners.

Sandeep has an excellent review of Arun Shourie’s book The Only Fatherland, which brings into light the anti-national activities of the Indian Communists.

When the Quit India Movement was called by Gandhi, the Communists initially supported it. Why? Stalin had then made a deal with Hitler to share certain European territories including parts of Poland. To achieve this, he sent out through the Comintern, pamphlets that the War was a war between the oppressive forces of capitalism and that the Commies should remain neutral and/or that wherever the forces of capitalism were active (read: European colonies), they needed to be opposed. Thus, Britain=Capitalist, India=British colony, therefore, oppose the British in India. The Indian Commies faithfully compiled. Not just that. In their obsession with The Marxist Gospel, they began to paint patriots–including but not limited to Gandhi–as “vultures, decadent, traitors.” Their struggle was the only true struggle, their way the only way to expel the British, and so on. As evidence, Shourie presents an array of extracts from their party letters, cartoons, and articles. One cartoon shows Subash Bose as a midget being led by Japanese imperialists, another shows him as a cur held up Goebbels. Gandhi is depicted as a kangaroo in whose pouch a frightened JP (frightened by the Commies, of course) jumps right back. And a typical passage that tarnishes the freedom fighters’ reputations:[The Only Fatherland]

Arun Shourie has been taking on the Communists for a long time. In his book Eminent Historians he gave us examples of how Communist historians are attempting to rewrite history to appease Muslims. I have not “The Only Fatherland” yet, but it is moving to the top of my list.