Populism and Rise of the Far-Right

Disclaimer: This post is part of a series of essays I wrote at the Young India Fellowship. This particular essay was written as a final paper for the course Globalization on Trial.

This essay attempts to illustrate that the world order tends to oscillate between globalism and populism. Globalism is always preceded and succeeded by populism and vice versa. Additionally, this essay argues that a shift from globalism to populism is almost always influenced by cultural factors rather than economic ones.

Twenty-first-century politics has witnessed an alarming rise of populism in the United States and Europe. The first warning signs came with the UK Brexit Referendum vote in 2016 swinging in the way of Leave. This was followed by a stupendous victory by billionaire Donald Trump to become the 45th President of the United States in November 2016. Since then, Europe has seen a steady rise in populist and far-right parties that have capitalized on Europe’s Immigration Crisis to raise nationalist and anti-Europe sentiments. Some instances include Alternative for Germany (AfD) winning 12.6% of all seats and entering the Bundestag, thus upsetting Germany’s political order for the first time since the Second World War, the success of the Five Star Movement in Italy and the surge in popularity of neo-nazism and neo-fascism in countries such as Hungary, Czech Republic, Poland and Austria.

Brexit poses some real problems for the United Kingdom in the event of a no-deal

This rise of the far-right has also, quite obviously, resulted in the decline in popularity of the left and the center-left. The Democratic Party suffered perhaps its largest upset in American Political History when its Presidential Candidate Hillary Clinton was handed a defeat by Trump despite being a clear favorite in the polls. The center-left SpD party of Germany has, for the first time, garnered fewer votes than the right-leaning AfD. The Socialists and the Labour Party in France and the Netherlands respectively also have suffered heavy defeats in parliamentary elections, resulting in significant losses of seats.

With this concise introduction in hand, in the following section, the essay will attempt to illustrate as to why this isn’t a startling phenomenon and instead was extremely predictable given the passage of human political and economic history. As mentioned earlier, the world always oscillates between populism and globalism and one is always preceded and succeeded by the other. To prove this point, this essay will present several instances from world history that clearly illustrate this trend.

As a first example, this essay will consider the Thirty Years War fought in Central Europe between 1618 and 1648. The war, one of the deadliest in human history, recorded over eight million casualties. The political and economic atmosphere of Europe, prior to the seeds of the aforementioned conflict being sown, had many similarities with a globalist ‘state’. A large part of Europe came under the Byzantine Roman Empire and it was relatively alien to the concept of nation states. Since this was an empire, there was a free flow of people and goods. Most importantly, the Protestants and the Catholics, the two major schools of belief in Europe, were free to practice their faith.

The Thirty Years War

Tensions arose when the Holy Roman Emperor, Ferdinand II, tried to impose Roman Catholicism upon all his subjects. The result was a bloody war that lasted over three decades. The Thirty Years War validated the rise of the nation states after the end of the war. It led to the creation of the Dutch Republic, which was finally freed from Spanish rule (barring Southern Netherlands and Luxembourg). It established the dominance of France and the Bourbon Dynasty as well as facilitated the rise of the Swedish Empire.

This illustrates very clearly how a cultural clash (in terms of intolerance of a particular school of belief) triggered the shift of European political order from resembling globalism to nation states.

The following period, starting mid 17th century, saw the rise of East India Companies. The Thirty Years War was immediately followed by the Dutch Golden Age, a period facilitated by the Dutch East India Company, which went on to become the most valuable company of all time. This period also saw the beginning of British conquests into the eastern lands of India, China and Mesopotamia.

Continuing this trend into the 18th century, the European nation states colonized almost the entire known world. Aided by the Industrial Revolution starting in 1760, the world experienced globalization at a pace unparalleled until then. There was free (albeit controversial) flow of goods, people and ideas across continents. Thus, the European nation states built empires with lands spread across the world and brought in another era of globalism. In this way, the circle completed itself.

The Industrial Revolution

The next example follows the chronological timeline set by the previous; it starts its examination from the period prior to the outbreak of the First World War. The late nineteenth century was characterized by free trade between European Powers and their colonies (albeit at the expense of the colonies).

However, victories in the 1866 Austro-Prussian War and the 1870 Franco-Prussian war established Germany as a dominant power in Europe. This created tension with the British and French Empires and there was a constant struggle in Europe to ensure a balance of power. The balance broke with the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in June 1914 which plunged Europe, and eventually the entire world, into war.

The defeat of the Triple Entente (comprising of Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy) to Allied Powers led to the rise of populism and the far-right in these countries. Starting the early 1930s, the Nazi party, under the leadership of Adolf Hitler, turned Germany into a far-right dictatorship. Italy witnessed a similar populist uprising in the form of Benito Mussolini. Hitler’s ideas of Lebensraum and the conviction of the superiority of the Aryan race led him to conquer Poland in 1939, which led to the outbreak of the Second World War.

Adolf Hitler

The Second World War was the deadliest conflict in human history, with over 50 million fatalities. An Allied victory ensured the decimation of the far-right in Europe. The end of the Second World War thus marked the beginning of another shift from nation states and populism into globalism.

The second half of the twentieth century witnessed some amazing developments from the perspective of globalization. The United Nations (UN) was formed in 1945 to maintain international order and ensure that conflicts such as the Second World War didn’t take place again. The European Union was formed in 1957 with the ambitious plan of politically and economically uniting the entire continent of Europe. Economic Liberalization took place in the two largest countries in the world (by population): China, in 1978 and India, in 1991. The World Trade Organization (WTO) was founded in 1995 to regulate international trade.

But perhaps the most aggressive agent of globalization has been the dawn of the Information Age. The invention of the internet and the exponential increase for the demand in IT and software has connected the world like never before. The world has truly become a global village with everyone in the vicinity of communicating with everyone else.

If the aforementioned two examples are anything to go by, it suggests strongly that this wave of globalism will be followed by populism. This is exactly what is being witnessed in the global political landscape today. Therefore, two facts can be concluded beyond a reasonable doubt: globalism and populism operate in a cyclical manner and the preceding decades of globalism have ensured a rise of populism today.

The following sections of this essay will attempt at answering why globalism is succeeded by populist movements (usually by the far-right) by critically analyzing the economic and cultural effects of globalization. The essay will attempt to demonstrate that the latter plays a far larger and significant role than the former.

With the political climate shifting towards the idea of the nation-state (or nationalism), there have been fears of a decline in the popularity of the ideas of globalization, free trade, and open borders. Globalization has come under fire and has been castigated by populist governments worldwide. Some of the most audible dissent to globalization are economic, with the loss of jobs to immigrants, outsourcing and the dying of the manufacturing sector on account of trade and decentralization of production. Donald Trump secured a significant portion of his voter base by appealing to these sentiments. His campaign, with the tagline of Make America Great Again, promised stricter immigration laws, preferential treatment to American production and priority to jobs for Americans. Since becoming president, he has imposed trade tariffs worth hundreds of billions of dollars on countries such as Canada and China in an attempt to correct America’s trade deficit, withdrawn from the Paris Climate Agreement to save the dying coal mining industry and removed the US from the Trans-Pacific Partnership in a bid to further isolate the US from global politics and pump the budget inward.

Henry Hazlitt

The economic arguments against globalization are, however, extremely weak and lack statistical backing. The Economist Henry Hazlitt attempts at distilling the entire field of economics to a single principle:

The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.

Globalization almost always leads to creative destruction; the phenomena of loss of livelihood to superior technology, innovation or automation. It happened with the Industrial Revolution, it happened with colonization and now, it’s happening with the advent of the Internet.

Phenomena associated with globalization such as automation, free trade, decentralization of production and the internet have led to the loss of livelihood for many people, especially those employed in blue-collar manufacturing jobs.

However, this has also ensured that more output is created with lesser input thus driving down prices and increasing the variety of goods and services available to consumers. In its essence, this is the duty of an economy: to produce as much as possible at the lowest cost. Productivity is the only thing that should count. Lower prices of goods implies consumers have more disposable income in their hands. This stream of extra money, therefore, has the potential to create new industries and jobs for goods and services that people can afford now with the extra money. With Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand argument, it can be shown that the displaced people can actually move to these industries, thus returning the economy back to a stable equilibrium.

Therefore, it can be seen quite clearly that, in the long term, globalization affects all groups positively even in the face of creative destruction.

It is indeed true that globalization displaces some communities in the short run. However, the number of people displaced is dwarfed by the number of people reaping economic gains. It doesn’t make any economic sense at all to discard globalization for its minimal short term side effects. For instance, there are 135,000 works in the US Apparel Industry and 45 million Americans who live below the poverty line. It doesn’t make any economic sense to increase the price of clothing for millions of poor Americans (by banning clothing imports) to ensure a few hundred thousand get to keep their low income, low skill jobs. Following Hazlitt’s principle, it is in the greater interest of a society or country to only produce those goods and services it has a competitive advantage over and imports the rest. Globalization facilitates this and thus ensures stronger economies.

Finally, it is a misconception that the financial crisis created by globalism led to the rise of populism. Many associate the 2008 Economic Crisis as the starting point of Trumpism. However, by the time Americans were voting in 2016, the economy had fully recovered. Also, contrary to what Steve Bannon had claimed, a Gallup poll showed conclusively that non-supporters of Trump were just as likely as the supporters to be unemployed. Shifting our focus to the east, there is almost zero correlation between economic prosperity and the rise of the far-right in Europe too. Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Poland and Finland, all have right-wing populist ruling parties in spite of being some of the most economically prosperous countries in Europe. Therefore, it is imperative that we search for a stronger, alternate reason to explain these shifts.

Apart from economic crises, another school of dissent against globalization comes from cultural homogenization. Since globalization, by its very nature, results in the migration of people from one place to another, it also leads to the transport of cultures. More often than not, tensions arise as a result of the clash of cultures and this leads to the creation of nationalistic sentiments, often at the expense of the immigrants.

Migration is often cited as one of the biggest problems of globalization. However, the economic argument against migration is extremely weak. Take the United States, for instance. Only 33% of Americans hold college degrees and there are simply not enough Americans available to fill in for high skilled jobs. This availability gap is often filled by immigrants. Immigrant communities from India and China are significantly more prosperous, wealthy and educated than the average American.

The phobia against migration stems from xenophobia. Humans are, anthropologically speaking, xenophobic by nature. It is a trait that has allowed mankind to survive and eventually dominate the planet. Humans tend to form communities around ideas or traits and this sense of community is amplified when it comes in conflict with a rival community.

The Syrian Civil War

The Syrian Civil War resulted in one of the biggest refugee crisis of all time. This European Refugee Crisis is one of the main reasons for the rise of the far right in Europe. Most of the refugees from the Middle East were Muslims and the integration of Islamic values and traditions at such a humongous scale was the seed of conflict between the immigrants and the largely Christian natives.

Populism, therefore, is fed by xenophobia and racism. It stems from an inherent fear of the European natives for a loss of their culture and identity. Islam is seen as a direct threat to their culture. Harmonic multiculturalism, although a novel concept on paper, is extremely difficult to witness in practicality.

This fear is amplified by a fear of security. Since the starting of the refugee influx into Europe, there have been several, large scale terrorist attacks in major European cities with refugee perpetrators. France witnessed attacks in Nice and Paris in 2015 and 2016 that resulted in hundreds of death. Great Britain, too, has had its share of violence in the form of the Manchester Bombing in 2017 and semi-regular instances of refugee violence in London.

These attacks have led people to associate all refugees as terrorists, rapists, and haters of Europe; although an extremely negligible fraction of them are involved with extremism. Similar rhetoric was used to great success by Donald Trump through his stance on immigration and the wall on the US-Mexican border.

As we have already seen, cultural factors usually are the trigger for the genesis of populist movements. The Thirty Years War started when Catholicism was forced on the people. World War 2 occurred largely in part of Hitler’s goal to establish Aryan dominance and decimate any race that he thought inferior.

Therefore, it can be stated that globalism leads to multiculturalism which in turn leads to a clash of cultures and idea. These clashes form the breeding ground for chauvinism and populist movements and play a far greater role in the shift than economic concerns.

In conclusion, this paper has illustrated through historical examples, how globalism leads to populism and vice versa. They are states through which global political order regularly oscillates between. Finally, the paper demonstrated how cultural and not economic factors played a larger role in aiding shifts from globalism to populism.

References

1. Galston, William. 2018. The rise of European Populism and collapse of the Centre-Left. Brookings.
2. Marr, Andrew. 2013. A History of the World. Pan Publishing
3. Polišenský, P.V. 1954.  The Thirty Years War. 31-43 in Past & Present. Oxford University Press.
4. King, Stephen. 2017. The pendulum swings between Globalisation and the Nation State. Financial Times.
5. Kothari, Rajni. 1995. Under Globalisation: Will Nation State hold? 1593-1603 in Economic & Political Weekly Vol. 30 No. 26. Economic & Political Weekly
6. Shuster, Simon. 2018. The Populists. TIME Magazine.
7. Suter, Keith. 2018. The Future of the Nation-state in an Era of Globalization. 32-38 in Cadmus Journal Volume 3 Issue 4. Cadmus.
8. Roth, Kenneth. 2017. The Dangerous Rise of Populism: Global Attacks on Human Rights Values in World Report 2017. Human Rights Watch.
9. Cox, Michael. 2018. Understanding the Global Rise of Populism in Strategic Update, Feb 2018. LSE Ideas.
10. Hazlitt, Henry. 1946. Economics in One Lesson. Harper & Row Publishing.
11. Cramer, Kevin. 2007. The Thirty Years’ War and German Memory in the Nineteenth Century. 18-19 in Studies in War, Society, and the Military. University of Nebraska Press.
12. Greg, IP. 2018. No, the Financial Crisis didn’t Spawn Populism. The Washington Journal.
13. Argandona, Antonio. 2017. Why Populism is Rising and How to Combat it. Forbes.
14. Malets, Olga. 2017. Globalization, governance and the nation-state: An Overview. 16-24 in Economic Sociology Vol. 18 Iss. 2. Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies (MPIfG), Cologne.
15. Mitchell, Deborah. 2000. Globalization and social cohesion: Risks and responsibilities. The Year 2000 International Research Conference on Social Security.
16. Tierney, Stephen. 2015. Which Pluralism? 186-203 in Nationalism and Globalisation. Bloomsbury Publishing.
17. Kauffman, Eric. 2004. Rethinking Ethnicity: Majority Groups and Dominant Minorities. 40-57. Psychology Press.
18. Lund, Susan and Tyson, Laura. 2018. Globalization is Not in Retreat. Council on Foreign Relations.
19. Sides, John; Tesler, Michael, and Vavreck, Lynn. 2018. Identity Crisis: The 2016 Election & the Battle for the Meaning of America. Princeton University Press.
20. Eckman, James. 2017. Globalism vs. Nationalism: The Ideological Struggle of the 21st Century. Wall Street Journal.
21. Haidt, Jonathan. 2016. When and Why Nationalism Beats Globalism. 46-53 in The American Interest Vol. 32 No. 3. The American Interest.
22. Cuperus, Rene. 2007. Populism against Globalisation: A New European Revolt. Kalevi Sorsa Foundation.
23. Spannaus, Andrew. 2018. Regime Change and Globalization Fuel Europe’s Refugee and Migrant Crisis. Consortium News.

Were all poetry attributed to Kabir written by one person?

Disclaimer: This post is part of a series of essays I wrote at the Young India Fellowship. This particular essay was written as a final paper for the course Kabir: The Poet of Vernacular Modernity.

Kabir

The premise of this essay is to discern if all the works attributed to the saint, reformer and poet Kabir were written (or enunciated) by one person or if there is a possibility that the name ‘Kabir’ was a pseudonym used by multiple poets to broadcast their views between the 14th and 16th century.

The essay argues that the former is more likely. In other words, although historical evidence suggests that a weaver poet named Kabir did live in Benaras somewhere in the 15th century, the works attributed to him were not his original work alone.

The first argument relates to the exact timeline of Kabir’s life. To date, there is not enough historical evidence that puts this matter to rest. Mentions of Kabir can be found from as early as the starting of the 14th century to as late as the end of the 16th. In his book Kabir, Prabhakar Machwe gives us the wildly different timelines that have been proposed. The most widely held view, as purported by Kabir Charith Bodh, was that Kabir was born in 1398. However, in his work Khajinat-ul-Asafiya, Maulvi Ghulam insists that Kabir was born in 1594, two full centuries after the date suggested by Kabit Charith Bodh. But more than his birth, it is the year of his demise that is more hotly contested. A certain sect of scholars believe the date to be somewhere between 1448 and 1450. In fact, the Archaeological Society of India has suggested that a tomb of Kabir was built somewhere during 1450.

Sikander Lodi

However, this date of 1448 is rejected by other sects of scholars who believe Kabir was a contemporary of Sikander Lodi, a sultan who ruled Delhi between 1489 and 1517 and visited Kashi in 1494. A death in 1448 would not have made the fabled meeting between the two possible. The Ain-e-Akbari, a pivotal historical work published in 1596 by Abu Fazl also mentions Kabir as one of the great poets who is no longer alive.

Finally, there is a ‘middle-man’ view which suggests that Kabir lived through it all, between 1398 and 1518 to a ripe old age of 120. A possible reason for such immense confusion in his timeline could be because poetry in his name was being propagated and produced throughout this period of more than a century which led different people to believe that Kabir was alive at a different point of time. It is extremely unlikely that a man in the 15th century survived to the age of 120. What is more likely is that a group of poets published and produced poetry under the pseudonym Kabir over this very long timeline.

The second argument is that of Language. Kabir is extremely well known for rejecting the polished languages of Hindi and Persian in favor of a language more understandable to the masses; a language alluded to as Saddhukari by modern scholars. However, Kabir’s poetry is riddled with several languages. In Linda Hess’ The Bijak of Kabir and Prabhakar Machwe’s Kabir, this fact is alluded to in detail. His poems seem to have traces of Hindi, Persian, Marwari, Urdu, and Bengali. Additionally, there is evidence which suggests that his language style tends to change with the subject matter and does not have one particular style (that most other poets spend a lifetime to carve).

These facts can be used to postulate a very likely scenario: it is possible that several poets lived in several different regions and wrote on several different topics. Each poet had a distinct voice of his/her own and had issues and topics that s/he deeply cared about. However, they all came to use the pseudonym of Kabir as their signature. Therefore, the richness and diversity of language and the style of language being dependent on the topic.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Published by Penguin Classics.

The third argument is that of Women. Kabir’s views on femininity remain one of the most controversial facets of the poet. Kabir is known to have been extremely vocal about his condemnation and denunciation of women. His seemingly misogynistic attitude is however not an anomaly amongst the great poets of the world. In his Thus Spake Zarathustra, the German Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche famously wrote:

Everything about women is a riddle and everything about woman has one solution: it’s called pregnancy.

Kabir’s views were far stronger and far more blasphemous. For instance, one of Kabir’s couplets goes as follows:

Kabit naari parai apni, bhugtya narakahi jaye,
Aag aag sab ek hai, tamain haat na baahi

Translated by Gupta in 1986, this translates to:

Kabir says he who associates with a woman, whether his own or another’s, is going to hell
All fires are one; so don’t burn your hands in it.

Modern scholars argue that Kabir isn’t speaking against women in his poetry but is merely using women as a metaphor for all that is wrong and evil and unjust with the world.

This point of view would have been acceptable if not for another facet of Kabir: his love and eroticism for his God, Rama. As stated by Purushottam Agarwal in his essay The Erotic to the Divine: Kabir’s Notion of Love and Femininity, there are over 270 verses in which Kabir exhibits eroticism and a poignant desire to become one with his God. Furthermore, he does so by assuming the form of a woman. Assuming that Kabir had no qualms regarding homosexuality, it seems apparent that he believed that he could only make true love to his God by adopting the form of a woman. This, in turn, alludes to the fact that Kabir believed that the epitome of sexual desire and fulfillment, of unconditional and intense love, of devotion, could only be achieved by the feminine. The female was more capable of giving love to the male than the vice versa.

It is in these two aforementioned facts that lie the greatest contradiction and paradox regarding the poet. On one hand, he uses women as a symbol of all that is evil and unjust with the world and strongly denounces any form of interaction or contact with it. On the other hand, he becomes a female and asks the male God to become one with her. Even if we assume that Kabir’s usage of femininity is metaphorical, it is astounding that he would use the same metaphor to denote two completely contrasting ideas.

As with the previous two arguments, this contradiction can be fixed if we assume that the works are by separate poets. One poet used femininity as a metaphor for evil. The other used it as the epitome of love, desire and affection to God.

Virginia Woolf

A related question could be: why does Kabir find a need to convert to the female form to show his love for God? Why doesn’t he make God female instead? While the explanation that the woman is a metaphor for the zenith of love, affection, and desire is convincing, we should not rule out another equally plausible explanation: the existence of a female poet writing under the pseudonym of Kabir. Why a female poet would do is extremely obvious and has been brilliantly elucidated by Virginia Woolf in her essay, If Shakespeare Had A Sister. If this were indeed the works of a woman, it would have been very unlikely that it would have reached the levels of popularity they enjoy to this day. Combine this with the fact that a woman expressing her erotic desires would have been extremely taboo in the conservative 15th century India. The Bhakti poet Meera did but she lost all her material possessions in the process. In other words, there was plenty of incentive to write under the pseudonym of a famous male poet.

Thus far, this paper has discussed certain facts about Kabir that hint at the possibility of the existence of multiple poets rather than one. The rest of this paper will focus on plausible reasons as to why there was an incentive to do such a thing.

William Shakespeare

The premise of multiple poets writing under one common pseudonym is not a new idea. It has also been proposed in relation to probably the greatest poet of all time, William Shakespeare. There are some startling similarities between the two giants. Both were born into illiterate households. There is historical evidence suggesting that Shakespeare’s father and son were both illiterate. It seems highly unlikely that the intermediate generation reached the epitome of literacy. Secondly, there are the circumstances surrounding his death. He makes no mention of his books, plays or poems in his will or his documents. The only theatrical references were interlined in his will which cast deep suspicion on the authenticity of his requests. Diana Price, in her essay Reconsidering Shakespeare’s Monument, argues that Shakespeare’s works were authored by aristocrats such as Derby and Oxford under the pseudonym and they did so to bypass the “stigma of print”, a convention that restricted works by aristocrats to be published only in private circles and not be made available to the public. Another reason may have been because Shakespeare’s plays clearly advocate a Republican form of government and therefore its author was always at risk of being prosecuted by the monarchy.

The aforementioned point finds a great amount of relevance in the context of Kabir. Kabir’s poetry contained vast amounts of criticism for every major religion that existed in the subcontinent in the 15th century, be it Hinduism, Islam or Buddhism. Criticism of religious beliefs and thoughts do not go down well even in the 21st century so one can imagine the magnitude of possible repercussions five centuries ago. Writing under the pseudonym of Kabir, a lower caste, illiterate Muslim weaver was the perfect deception. It would have helped all these poets with blasphemous views find a voice without facing the risk of prosecution.

With time, it is possible that the name of Kabir became synonymous with rational thought, the denunciation of any form of God and a rejection of irrational practices of Hinduism and Islam. In such a scenario, it made even more sense to continue using the name of Kabir long after the original weaver was dead. Kabir, in this way, becomes a symbol.

In conclusion, this essay does not reject the existence of a weaver-poet named Kabir. It is very likely that such a person did exist. But what is equally likely is the possibility that all works written in his name were not written by one person. They were written by poets in different regions in different languages advocating different thoughts. Kabir, therefore, was more of a symbol; an amalgamation of revolutionary thoughts and the epitome of South Asian Literature between the 14th and the 16th centuries.

References

1. Hess, L. & Singh, S. (Tr.) (1986) The Bijak of Kabir
2. Agrawal, P. (2011) The Erotic to the Divine: Kabir’s Notion of Love and Femininity
3. Machwe, P. (1968) Kabir
4. Woolf, V. (1929) A Room of One’s Own
5. Price, D. (1997) Reconsidering Shakespeare’s Monument
6. Agrawal, P. (2004) Thematology: Seeking an Alternative to Religion Itself

Summer Reading II: Non-Fiction

 

In the previous post, I had listed down books which predominantly fell into the fiction genre. In contrast, this post will focus primarily on non-fiction. However, before I start listing down my favorites of the genre, I’ll be doing a short section on contemporary fiction first for the sake of achieving a sense of completion.

Contemporary Fiction

To be honest, I haven’t read a lot of contemporary fiction. I haven’t all the books listed over here. I’ve included them purely on the basis of the recommendations of the online community as well as a few credible friends.

• The Fault in Our Stars- John Green
  Two terminally ill teenagers meet and fall in love. This books is an absolute favorite among my female friends. Get ready to get all teary eyed.
• The Kite Runner- Khaled Hosseni
  Set in modern Afghanistan, The Kite Runner chronicles the lives of two young Afghan boys as they witness the fall of the Afghan monarchy, the Soviet intervention and the rise of the Taliban regime.
• Q&A- Vikas Swarup
  The book on which the Oscar winning movie Slumdog Millionaire is based on, Q&A offers us a glimpse into the dark, macabre lives of children in Mumbai’s slums. After reading the book, you’ll genuinely happy and content with the quality of life you’ve got.
• The Book Thief- Markus Zusak
  Few books have left me in such a maelstrom of emotions as The Book Thief. Set in Nazi Germany and narrated by Death Himself, it is the story of 13 year old Liesel Meminger as she struggles to find happiness and meaning through books.
• Midnight’s Children- Salman Rushdie
  When a book wins the ‘Booker of Bookers’ in both the 25th and the 40th anniversary of the prize, you know it has to be something spectacularly good. Set in post-colonial India, with its magical realism, Midnight’s Children is just that. A must read for every literature aficionado.

Poetry

• The Prophet-Khalil Gibran
  The magnum opus of my favorite poet, The Prophet is filled with timeless advice on everything imaginable: love, work, family, children, relationships, hate. And the lines are so beautiful that they are bound to strike a chord with your heart.
• Gitanjali- Rabindranath Tagore
  This work by Tagore made him the first non-European in history to win a Nobel Prize. And it wasn’t without good reason. Even though I read the translated version, I found his verses to be overwhelmingly euphonious.
• 20 Love Songs and a Song of Despair– Pablo Neruda
  The champion of passion and unrequited love, Pablo Neruda has given words to the ardor of countless lovers across the globe. This is a collection of some of his very best (See Twin Geniuses: Tagore and Neruda).
• Essential Rumi- Coleman Barks
  The translated works of 13th century Sufi mystic poet Rumi, Essential Rumi is a treasure trove of wisdom imparted by the mystic almost over a millennium ago. Like Gibran, Rumi’s lines will definitely manage to reach the deepest centers of your heart.

I realize that the poetry I’ve listed are all translated works. If you want to read ‘pure’ English poetry, look for the works of William Blake (Songs of Innocence and Experience), Walt Whitman (Leaves of Grass), Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, T.S.Eliot, Alfred Lord Tennyson and Edgar Allen Poe.

Biography

• Steve Jobs- Walter Isaacson
  What sets Walter Isaacson’s biography apart is its unapologetic honesty of the man who founded the most valuable company on the planet. Halfway through the book, I hated and loved Jobs at the same time. Very few books will give you such honesty.
• The Man Who Knew Infinity- Robert Kanigel
  My favorite biography, Kanigel’s account of Indian genius Ramanujan is probably the most comprehensive account you will get of the great mathematician’s life.
• The Accidental Billionaires- Ben Mezrich
  Although not a biography per se, Mezrich’s tale of the rise of Facebook and a bitter legal battle that ensued shortly after its launch makes it an exhilarating read.
• Surely you’re joking, Mr. Feynman!- Richard Feynmann
  The autobiography of one of the most eccentric physicists of the twentieth century, this book is an account of the craziest adventures and discussions undertaken by Feynmann.

Art, Culture and History

• Natasha’s Dance- Orlando Figes
  Russia has given some of the greatest authors in history. Russian novels and stories can pierce your heart like no other. This book is an account of the cultural history of Russia that gives us an insight into the kinds of developments that took place that led to the rise of the Russian arts.
• The Story of Art- E.M.Gombrich
  This introduction to art gives us an account of its history from cave paintings to experimental art of the 1960s.
• On Writing- Stephen King
  This semi-autobiography of King is an ode to the art of writing and the struggles and delights of being a writer.
• The Diary of a Young Girl- Anne Frank
  The unintentional autobiography of Holocaust’s most famous victim, The Diary of a Young Girl gives us a surreal glimpse into the lives of the Jews hiding in Nazi Germany.
• Unbroken- Laura Hillenbrand
  This collection of stories from World War 2 gives us accounts of survival, resilience and redemption showcased by civilians and armies alike.

Technology, Math and Startups

• Zero to One- Peter Thiel
  A collection of the notes of the class taught by founder of Paypal and Palantir, Peter Thiel, Zero to One is widely regarded as the bible of starting up.
• The $100 Startup– Chris Guillebeau
  This book is about micro-businesses and roaming entrepreneurs and how it is actually feasible making a living out of doing something that you love (See Microbusiness and Travel)
• The Code Book- Simon Singh
  One of my favorite non-fiction books of all time, The Code Book narrates the little told story of the art of security and secret writing.
• Fermat’s Last Theorem- Simon Singh
  This book is an account of a three centuries long struggle to prove Fermat’s Last Theorem; a proof which Fermat claimed not to have put on paper because it required too much space.
• God Created The Integers- Stephen Hawking
  With commentary from Hawking, God Created the Integers highlights the biggest mathematical breakthroughs in the history of mankind which went to shape human civilization as we know it.

Science

• A Brief History of Time- Stephen Hawking
  Arguably the most famous science book of all time, A Brief History of Time gives the layman a glimpse into the wonderfully complicated universe that we live in and our struggle to understand it.
• A Short History of Nearly Everything- Bill Bryson
  This book on Big History gives us an account of the history of the Universe, from the Big Bang to the present day (See Big History)
• Chariot of the Gods- Erich von Daniken
  A bold hypothesis of how human civilization was shaped by extra terrestrial beings who visited Earth a long time ago, Chariot of the Gods is the quintessential account (and possibly proof) of panspermia and intelligent extra-terrestrial life.
• What If- Randall Munroe
  In this book, former NASA scientist and founder of xkcd comics Randall Munroe answers absurd questions regarding the world and the universe (See Of Science and Comic Books)

Philosophy and Religion

• The God Delusion- Richard Dawkins
  The bible of atheism, The God Delusion argues how the probability of a supernatural being existing is almost zero if the theory of evolution is to be believed.
• The Dhammapada- Anonymous
  The Dhammapada is a collection of the Buddha’s teachings and gives us a glimpse into the teachings and principles of Buddhism.
• History of Western Philosophy- Bertrand Russell
  History of Western Philosophy is an account of every major philosophical thought from the time of the ancient Greeks to the present

Economics and Psychology

• Freakonomics and Superfreakonomics- Steven Leviit and Stephen Dubner
  The craziest economics books you can find, Freakonomics and Superfreakonomics tell us about the hidden side of everything. Why do drug dealers live with their moms? Why should suicide bombers buy life insurance? How did legalization of abortion lead to a drop in crime rate in the US? Read the books to find out.
• Thinking Fast and Slow- Daniel Kahneman
  The bible of Behavioral Economics, Thinking Fast and Slow is one of the best books you’ll read on the subject (See Revisiting Psychology)
• Predictably Irrational- Dan Ariely
  Like the previous book, this too gives us an insight into the anomalies and idiosyncrasies of human behavior. A must read for anyone who plans on starting a business or is in marketing or public relations (See Human Behavior and Irrationality)
• Economics in One Lesson- Henry Hazlitt
  A champion of the Austrian School of Economic Thought, Hazlitt tries to explain the problems with traditional economic principles through a series of well known historical cases.
• The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat- Oliver Sacks
  A brilliant account of the strangest cases encountered by Sacks in his medical career, this book is a must read for anyone with the slightest interest in Clinical Psychology.
• Interpretation of Dreams- Sigmund Freud
  One of the pioneers of the field of Psychology, Freud sets out to explain how our dreams can tell us much about our deepest desire, passion, pain and ambition.

And I shall stop here. I think I have covered a majority of the major fields of interest. Yet, I understand that one person’s experience with books leads to the creation of a relatively skewed list. Again as before, this list is in no ways exhaustive of any kind. There are plenty of amazing books I haven’t listed or have missed out on. Please feel free to list them in the comments.

French Drama

 

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As I’d mentioned in French Classical Literature, it was by pure accident that I’d picked up William Wilkins Cleaver’s Classic French Course in History. I thought it to be a book on elementary French. Instead, it turned out to be a historical account of French literary giants up until the nineteenth century. After almost two weeks, I’m done with the book. And now in retrospect, I must say that picking up this book was a happy accident.

A very admirable feature of the book was that it gave excerpts from the works of the person it was focusing on in a particular chapter and allowed the reader to form an opinion of the work himself. This way, I came to know of books that I’d have greatly enjoyed but would have never probably come across had it not been for this book; Le Rochefaucald’s Maxims, Montaigne’s Essays and Racine’s Polyeucte, for example.

Although the book was diverse in its choice of its Frenchmen who have made contributions to a wide variety of fields including politics, history, science and religion, the ones I enjoyed reading the most was about the French dramatists Corneille and Racine. Hence, the title of this post.

The English speaking world is, I feel, largely ignorant about French drama. We’re accustomed to limiting ourselves to the ancient Greeks and Shakespeare. Not that it is without good reason. The two schools of drama are probably the greatest there are. Like French poetry, French drama has also been largely overshadowed by its English counterparts. But after reading the book, I found myself wondering why. The little excerpts I read of Corneille’s and Racine’s plays were delightful reads.

A characteristic of French tragedy is its grandeur, something like a Yash Chopra or Karan Johar movie. And the French dramatist like to overflow their dramas with heroic characters. For instance, the play Polyeucte involves a love triangle where all three are willing to make supreme sacrifices of their love for the sake of their beloved and their country. You actually find yourself at a loss as to who to empathize with and root for. Personally, I find this to be a delightful quality in a play and would love to see one in action.

Being a part of the Dramatics Section here at IIT Roorkee, we are to host two plays in the next semester. I was incredibly keen on trying Shakespeare, something which our section has never done in three decades of its existence. But as has been pointed out to me several times, such an undertaking is implausible. I’m now considering looking into these French dramas. It’s highly unlikely that they be plausible either but if its translated versions are lucid and simple enough, I’d definitely like to pitch it in as a nominee for the stage play script.

Chariot of the Gods

 

Since the advent of the End Semester Examinations, there has not been an awful lot I have been able to do apart from drown myself in notes and browse through every social networking site I’ve ever signed up for. Still, I managed to find some time to read Chariot of the Gods, a book by German author Erik von Daniken.

The premise of the book was quite fascinating to start with. Daniken proposes a theory that our ancestors were actually in contact with intelligent extra-terrestrial beings who shaped the future of human civilization on planet Earth. I’ll admit I am a sucker for alternative and conspiracy theories. The Da Vinci Code is one of the my absolute favourites mostly on part of the kind of blasphemy it propagates so boldly. The book also was only about 220 pages long so I figured it wouldn’t take more than 3-4 hours to complete it.

I must admit I found the theories and evidence put forward to back them extremely convincing. There are a lot of things about our past that simply don’t fit into our existing model of our archaeology and scientific research and we choose to ignore it rather than develop radically different theories which could disrupt the scientific status quo.

Most of the ancient religious texts such as The Holy Bible and The Epic of Gilgamesh speak of the Gods creating a devastating flood that wiped out a majority of the human race and sparing a select few to continue their progeny (for instance, Noah in The Bible). Still others such as The Mahabharata and Mayan tablets explain in eerie detail, flying chariots with ‘Gods’ at their helm. Since most of these religions and civilizations responsible for these texts were not in contact with each other, it cannot be dismissed as mere coincidence that so many different people isolated from each other came up with the same story as a figment of their imagination.

What happened was this: Super intelligent beings from a different galaxy ventured into our solar system and found Earth. However, they found the human inhabitants over there to be savages and devoid of the technological wonders that made their travel possible. The Earthlings, on the other hand, were so fascinated by these extra terrestrial beings and their spaceships that they immediately assigned them the status of God. These aliens then taught the humans of some of their technological marvels which explains why some ancient civilizations were aware of things such as the length of a Venus year and the exact mass of planet Earth. The aliens then proceeded to interbreed with the humans and we are all descendants of this cross breeding.

These beings may have come from as close as Planet Mars. There is evidence suggesting that Deimos, one of Mars’ moons is actually an artificial satellite. Based on this evidence, it is not entirely far fetched to presume that intelligent beings actually existed on Mars millions of years ago and they immigrated to Earth once the planet became to hostile to support life any more. It is entirely possible that we are descendants of the Martians.

I’ll refrain from explaining Daniken’s theories any further as it is four in the morning and I really should go to bed. However, I’d strongly suggest you read it. It would make for amazing discussions and debates in your social circles.

A Short History of Everything- II

 

Won’t say too much here. I’m done with A Short History of Nearly Everything. As I had mentioned in the previous post, the second half of the book dealt with the history of life on planet Earth and how a series of flukes conveniently paved way for the dawn of homo sapiens.

It’s quite counter intuitive how we know more about the galaxies and stars that dot our skies than our oceans and seas. Apparently 99.9% of the species of organisms that currently inhabit our planet have not been discovered yet. There is a extremely high probability that an expedition into one of the major rain forests in the world could lead to the discovery of at least a dozen species that are currently unknown to man. The magnitude of our ignorance of organisms we share the planet with is kind of surprising, to say the least.

 

A Short History of Everything- I

 

As I had mentioned in Big History, I had zeroed in on Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Everything as my primary source of getting to know more about the subject. I’m halfway through the book and the content provided by the book so far has been so vast and so diverse that I felt it more appropriate to update about it in a series of posts. Devoting a single post to the history of everything didn’t seem to do the book justice, so there.

Firstly, the book does live up to the hype and its ratings. I spent a huge amount of time in middle school reading up Horrible Science books. As a result, I am in possession of a large mental repository of facts about science and scientists that are usually not found in science textbooks. After going through three hundred odd pages, I realized how much I didn’t know about stuff that ought to be known by everyone. How is the age of the Earth and the Universe calculated? Why and how were the dinosaurs suddenly wiped out from the face of the planet? And some of the facts the book stated were really bizarre. Isaac Newton wrote the Principia when a fellow astronomer, Edmond Halley asked him about how and why the earth revolved. Apparently, Newton had formulated his laws of motion and the universal law of gravitation decades ago. He simply didn’t bother to publish his results. It was only upon the insistence of Halley that he wrote the book and became, arguably, the greatest scientist the world has ever known.

If there were a comet or an asteroid approaching our planet, we wouldn’t be aware of it until two weeks before it was due to collide and by then, it would be too late to do anything. Essentially, if there was an asteroid approaching our planet, we would be in the dark (quite literally) about it and the havoc it would create on colliding with the planet i enough to end the human race as we know it. And considering there are hundreds of thousands of asteroids in our system, every moment we live might be our last. Terrifyingly fascinating, isn’t it?

It is facts like these, backed up by credible scientific research and evidence that makes Bryson’s book such a compelling read. So far, I have read about the Big Bang, the Universe, the Galaxies and our Solar System. You may feel that you have adequate knowledge of the aforementioned topics but it is only after reading chapters dedicating to these topics due you actually grasp the magnitude of your ignorance (at least in my case). Did you know, for instance, that until very recently the Earth was believed to be only a few million years old? Or that the first dinosaur fossil found was discarded as the discoverer couldn’t grasp its importance?

Bryson’s later chapters are devoted to the planet we live on and broadly gives an overview of the planet from the viewpoint of two subjects: Chemistry and Geology. After reading the chapter on Alchemy, Chemistry and the Elements, I kind of grasped as to how cruel and unfair the world of science can sometimes be. Some of the greatest geniuses who ever lived are not even mentioned in scientific literature. Take Swedish Chemist Carl Scheele, for example. This man independently discovered eight elements including hydrogen, oxygen and chlorine. But he is not given credit for it. The majority of the world doesn’t even know his name.

I’ve never been a fan of Geology or Geography but the fact that I went through almost a dozen chapters dedicated to them effortlessly speaks of the effortless ease with which the author conveys major ideas to us. Although it is highly unlikely that I will pick up a book on Geology as a follow-up, I can confidently say that I know enough to discuss a few topics with a geologist over a cup of tea.

The latter half of the book covers Biology and Evolution and I’m sure it will be an even more exhilarating read than the former. I liked Biology at one point of time. I have a feeling I still do. I maybe just halfway through the book but here’s one piece of advice I’d give to anyone who wants to know about how the universe and the world works: read the book. Trust me, it’s worth it. Every single page of it.

 

French Classical Literature

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I’ll be honest. I never intended on studying or even going through French classical literature. I was just randomly surfing through the Kindle Store looking for French books to learn the language from. I came across this one book called Classic French Course in English by William Cleaver Wilkinson and assumed that the book was an elementary textbook for the French language. I was hugely mistaken.

What the book actually is, is an account of French geniuses who shaped the history of French literature and the sciences from the fourteenth century to the present. This was certainly not the book I was looking for. However, after going through its lengthy preface, I decided to go ahead and read the book. It had an impressive set of people for its chapters. Voltaire, Rousseau and Pascal, to name a few.

The book is highly academic in nature and provides a descriptive criticism of every person it takes into consideration in a single chapter. Frankly, I found the first couple of chapters boring. It spoke of French historians Froissart and Rabelais respectively. I would have put the book away had it not been for the chapters on La Montaigne and La Rochefoucald.

This were the chapters were the book actually began to feed you information and facts that were interesting. I had never heard of the two aforementioned people before. However, their philosophies had a extremely critical impact in the history of the French school of thought. Montaigne’s solitary work Essays literally shaped the views of French thinkers for centuries and continue to do so. I was personally deeply moved by the schools of thought the two propagated, especially the latter. La Rochefoucald’s Maxim is an extremely small book of a collection of over 700 verses. In most of his verses, he speaks of his concept of self-love being the major driving force of every human activity, including apparently contradictory acts such as altruism. The book gave a glimpse into a few of his verses and I was hooked. I think I’ve stated this before in my posts but there is a certain romance in being able to relate to words written centuries ago. It is a beautiful, humbling feeling to fully grasp the might of the pen.

I’m only a third through the book. I will probably devote two more posts to update my progress with it, along with A Short History of Everything. In other news, End Semesters are approaching and I really, desperately need to get on with studying. Now.

Big History

 

Recently, I viewed a TED Talk titled David Christian: The history of our world in 18 minutes. It was on a subject known as Big History. Big History, as the speaker David Christian explains, is an emerging academic field that undertakes a highly ambitious task of narrating the entire history of the universe, from the Big Bang to the present. It does so through a potpourri of scientific fields including astrophysics, geology, biology, anthropology etc. It is this polyamory of so many diverse fields that drew me to the subject and had me wanting for more.

A quick search for Big History books got me one clear winner: A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson. The book is considered as the Bible of the subject. I’ve gone through the first three chapters and I’ve not been disappointed. It is immensely beautiful as to how Bryson so seamlessly takes the discussion from the realms of Physics to explain universal laws such as that of gravitation to that of geology to explain the formation of mountains and calculating the age of the planet we inhabit.

Big History covers so many fields that I do not think I will be able to do justice to it by writing about it in just one post (Also, I haven’t even finished a tenth of Bryson’s book). Hence, I will be updating about the various eras of history that I’m learning and reading about. It will easily take up portions of about half a dozen posts.

As I mentioned earlier, I’m done with three chapters and I’m on the verge of completion of the fourth. So far, Bryson has explained the Big Bang, how the entire universe came out of a singularity, the nature of the solar system, the planets in it, the position of our planet in the Universe etc. in the first part of the book (Chapters 1-3). In Chapter 4, he turns his attention to our planet. What is its circumference, its mass, what kind of orbit it revolves around and why, why does it have mountains, the seas etc. The debates that have raged over these topics are definitely worth a read. I’m not even a tenth into the book and it has already given insights into the minds of over a dozen geniuses. Big History is a rough guide towards the entire field of science. To condense so many fields into a single subject may seem like an almost impossible task but if the TED Talks and the books are to be reviewed, I must say it has been wildly successful so far in its attempts.