Reading List: Jan 2020-Jan 2021

1. Gulag (Anne Applebaum)
2. Persepolis 2 (Marjane Satrapi)
3. In Service of the Republic (Vijay Kelkar, Ajay Shah)
4. A Wizard of Earthsea (Ursula K LeGuin)
5. The Master and Margarita (Mikhail Bulgakov) [reread]
6. The Tombs of Atanu (Ursula K LeGuin)
7. The Farthest Shore (Ursula K LeGuin)
8. Tehanu (Ursula K LeGuin)
9. Mao's Great Famine (Frank Dikotter)
10. Serotonin (Michel Houellebecq)
11. Exit West (Mohsin Hamid)
12. What we talk about when we talk about love (Raymond Carver)
13. The Tragedy of Liberation (Frank Dikotter)
14. The Cultural Revolution (Frank Dikotter)
15. घाचर गोचर (विवेक शानभाग)
16. The Fatal Conceit (Friedrich Hayek)
17. The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis (Lydia Davis)
18. Capitalism and Freedom (Milton Friedman)
19. The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Milan Kundera)
20. The Road to Serfdom (Friedrich Hayek)
21. The Handmaid's Tale (Margaret Atwood)
22. Iron Curtain (Anne Applebaum)
23. The Better Angels of Our Nature (Steven Pinker)
24. The Twenty-Seventh City (Jonathan Franzen)
25. Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity (David Foster Wallace)
26. The Undoing Project (Michael Lewis)
27. Life and Fate (Vasily Grossman)
28. After the Funeral (Agatha Christie)
29. The Mysterious Affairs At Styles (Agatha Christie)
30. The Murder on the Links (Agatha Christie)
31. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (Agatha Christie)
32. Death on the Nile (Agatha Christie)
33. Mothsmoke (Mohsin Hamid)
34. Three Act Tragedy (Agatha Christie)
35. The Great Gtasby (F Scott Fitzgerald)
36. A Legacy of Spies (John leCarre)
37. ABC Murders (Agatha Christie)
38. Murder on the Orient Express (Agatha Christie)
39. Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen) [reread]
40. Harry Potter and the Philisopher's Stone (JK Rowling) [reread]
41. Sense and Sensibilities (Jane Austen)
42. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (Susanna Clarke)
43. Oliver Twist (Charles Dickens)
44. Humiliated and Insulted (Fyodor Dostoyevsky) [reread]
45. Thirty Years That Shook Physics (George Gamow)
46. Look to Windward (Iain M Banks)

Reject and don't (re)submit

"We are sorry inform you that your submission for the Journal of Pain and Death has been rejected on account of being too life-affirmatory. We thank you for your submission and hope that you will submit to us again."

More TASWOSAW Inversion

From 'Jaan Tere Naam' (1992), lyricist Sameer.

तेरे से मैरिज करने को मैं बम्बई से गोआ आया 

पर तेरे डैडी ने मुझको रेड सिग्नल दिखलाया 

डैडी से तेरे क्या लेना मुझे?

तू मुझको चाहे मैं चाहूँ तुझे 

ये अक्खा इंडिया जानता है हम तुम पे मरता है 

दिल क्या चीज़ है जानम अपनी जान तेरे नाम करता है 

...

To get wedded to you from Bombay to Goa I came

But your daddy he red signalled me all the same 

With your daddy what do I have to do?

You love me and I love you

The whole India knows it that I'd die for you

What trifle be a heart o dear I grant my soul to you 

TASWOSAW

Trivenis by Gulzar [sung by Jagjit Singh]

ज़िन्दगी क्या है, जानने के लिए 

ज़िंदा रहना बहुत ज़रूरी है 

आज तक कोई भी रहा तो नहीं 

है नहीं जो दिखाई देता है 

आईने पर छपा हुआ चेहरा 

तर्जुमा आईने का ठीक नहीं 

आओ हम सब पहन लें आईने 

सारे देखेंगे अपना ही चेहरा 

सबको सारे हसीं लगेंगे यहाँ 

हमको ग़ालिब ने ये दुआ दी थी 

तुम सलामत रहो हज़ार बरस 

ये बरस तो फ़क़त दिनों में गया 

...

What is life, to know this

Staying alive is very important

Till date none have

It is not what it seems

The face printed on the mirror

The mirror's translation is not accurate

Let us all wear mirrors

Each will see their own image

All will find each handsome

We were blessed by Ghalib

May you be preserved for a thousand years

This year though passed merely in days

Pop quiz

How is it that Žižek doesn't have the virus yet?

Backward guidance

First they came as sniffles, then trickles, then in waves, and finally in gushing streams---unbidden, unannounced, unasked for---them tears that is; and threatened to overwhelm her senses, to the acute bafflement of those watching, wondering what did provoke such an onset, the released quarterly earnings only three percent below target after all. Although initially she tried to frame it as misfirings of her overwrought broom of the system, eager to remove traces of its long-dormant lachrymosal inactivity, only much later would she herself begin to grope towards its mysterious incidence and its ambiguous, weakly tethered connection to a set of distant memories she began to be convinced were systematically tampered with and set ablaze.

The Reading List: Jan 2019--Jan 2020

1. Dune (Frank Herbert) (reread)
2. Sapiens (Yuval Noah Harari)
3. Essays (George Orwell)
4. Homo Deus (Yuval Noah Harari)
5. The Futurological Congress (Stanislaw Lem)
6. South of the Border, West of the Sun (Haruki Murakami)
7. Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage (Haruki Murakami)
8. The Blind Watchmaker (Richard Dawkins)
9. Fahrenheit 451 (Ray Bradbury)
10. Essential Chomsky (Noam Chomsky)
11. The Dark Forest (Liu Cixin)
12. Death's End (Liu Cixin)
13. The Map and the Territory (Michel Houllebecq)
14. The Night Manager (John le Carre)
15. Men Without Women (Haruki Murakami)
16. Thinking, fast and slow (Daniel Kahneman)
17. After Dark (Haruki Murakami)
18. English August (Upamanyu Chatterjee)
19. Against Interpretation and Other Essays (Susan Sontag)
20. I married a communist ( Philip Roth)
21. The last samurai (Helen deWitt)
22. Directorate S (Steve Coll)
23. साये में धूप (दुष्यंत कुमार)
24. Pakistan: A Hard Country (Anatol Lieven)
25. The Best of R K Laxman
26. कवि-मन (अज्ञेय)
27. A Beginner's Guide to Japan (Pico Iyer)
28. Speak, Memory (Vladimir Nabokov)
29. The Foundation Pit (Andrey Platonov)
30. The Man who solved the world (Zuckerman)
31. Normal People (Sally Rooney)

अथ उवाच अज्ञेय [कवि मन]

'कितना ही ऊपर चढ़ जाओ, जब बैठोगे तो अपने ही चूतड़ों पर'

'अरे यार तो क्या हुआ? उसी जोड़ का सच तो यह भी है कि कितना ही नीचे धँस जाओ, जब खड़े होगे तो अपने ही पैरों पर!'

Corporations as AI

The observation is due to perhaps Charles Stross but the argument goes as follows: an AI tasked with efficient paperclip manufacturing may (mistakenly) destroy all matter in the universe in order to convert it to paperclips, thereby faithfully carrying out its orders. Somewhat similarly, modern corporations, which have been (legally) tasked with maximizing shareholder value are carrying out their duties faithfully, without worrying about attendant poor effects on the environment etc. From this perspective, corporations are similar to AIs and cannot override their programming (even if made aware) due to the imperative logic of goal/objective function optimization.

Is this a valid characterization of a corporation (or indeed an AI)? Why or why not? Explain in brief. (10 points)

Famous Last Words

"Satire and irony were his favorite modes of expression."

The Reading List: Jan 2018 to Jan 2019

1. 2010: Odyssey Two (Arthur C Clarke)
2. The Vegetarian (Han Kang)
3. The Three Body Problem (Liu Cixin)
4. Invisible Planets (Editor and translator Ken Liu)
5. The Sellout (Paul Beatty)
6. The Competent Authority (Shovon Chaudhary)
7. Who Gets What and Why? (Alvin Roth)
8. मन हिंडोला (विनोद कुमार त्रिपाठी)
9. Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron (Jai Arjun Singh)
10. Every Love Story is a Ghost Story (D T Max)
11. सीन 75 (राही मासूम रज़ा)
12. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (John LeCarre)
13. The World of Hrishikesh Mukherjee (Jai Arjun Singh)
14. Mason and Dixon (Thomas Pynchon)
15. India Moving (Chinmay Tumbe)
16. The Peripheral (William Gibson)
17. करता भूलूं क्या याद करूं (हरिवंश राय बच्चन)
18. The Secret Pilgrim (John LeCarre)
19. Milk and Honey (Rupi Kaur)
20. Atomised (Michel Houellebecq)
21. Vampire in Love (Enrique Vila Matas)
22. The Honorable Schoolboy (John LeCarre)
23. सोनम गुप्ता बेवफ़ा नहीं है (अनिल यादव)
24. A Death in the Family (Karl Ove Knausgaard)
25. My Brilliant Friend (Elena Ferrante)

Further Recent Mega Acquisitions

Featuring:

1. मन हिंडोला (विनोद त्रिपाठी)
2. My Brilliant Friend (Elena Ferrante)
3. The World of Hrishikesh Mukherjee (Jai Arjun Singh)
4. A Death in the Family (Karl Over Knausgaard)
5. Goodbye, Columbus (Philip Roth)
6. I Married a Communist (Philip Roth)
7. Mason and Dixon (Thomas Pynchon)
8. Every Love Story is a Ghost Story (D T Max)
9. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (John le Carre)
10. सीन: 75 (राही मासूम रज़ा)
11. Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro (Jai Arjun Singh)

The New Arker

Philip Roth died May 22, 2018. With his passing, only a very few American writers of his caliber remain: DeLillo, Pynchon and perhaps Cormac McCarthy; though for sheer readability on a sentence-by-sentence basis, Roth towers over all. 

As ever, the Economist is at its most insightful:

...like all great artists, he inhabited and embodied contradictions. You cannot disagree with him more than he disagreed with himself. He wrote about patriotism and he hated patriots. He wrote about idealism and he despised idealists. He wrote about the family with great love, and yet he railed against the asphyxiation of family. He was a moralist who loathed moralists. He was an atheist locked in lifelong battle with a God who neither cared nor existed. His subject was often no more than ten square miles of New Jersey and therefore the whole world.

He was fearlessly engaged with the profane and the repellent; and yet his work is apt on any page to break out into such passages of compassion and sorrow that the reader is ambushed all over again—this time by emotion.

Do read the entire obituary in full: Philip Roth was one of America’s greatest novelists

NF has read only a very few of his books: American Pastoral (1997), The Plot Against America (2004), The Human Stain (2000); and of course, Portnoy's Complaint (1969). Two others were ordered at the news of his passing: Goodbye, Columbus (1959) and I Married A Communist (1998).

The overwhelming power of his writing to amuse, please, astound; and of course to so effortlessly move one, remain unparalleled. His replacement will be hard to find.

Goodbye Columbus!

Upendage

Upon knowing that their adopted son was of Indian heritage the parents decided to name their child 'Susurration-of-the-Whispering-Willows'. It would be only much later that the child would grow up to appreciate the aftereffects of their profound ignorance; find it in him to assume the name 'Devashekhara' and wage a war against ignorant parents everywhere. However, only those closest to him would ever know of his special weakness for gambling, casinos, horseriding, scalp-collecting; and of his vague nostalgia for a distant motherland he would never visit. 

The Reading List: Jan 2017 to Jan 2018

1. The Martian Chronicles (Ray Bradbury)
2. Ratner's Star (Don Delillo)
3. In Other Rooms, Other Wonders (Daniyal Mueenuddin)
4. The Human Stain (Philip Roth)
5. Prelude to Foundation (Isaac Asimov) (reread)
6. मोहन राकेश की यादगारी कहानियां (मोहन राकेश) (tr. Memorable Stories of Mohan Rakesh (Mohan Rakesh))
7. Never Let Me Go (Kazuo Ishiguro) 
8. Attack on Titan: Vol 1 (Hajime Isayama)
9. Attack on Titan: Vol 2 (Hajime Isayama)
10. Boomerang (Michael Lewis)
11. Forward the Foundation (Isaac Asimov)
12. Falling Man (Don DeLillo)
13. दाग़ देहलवी: ग़ज़ल का एक स्कूल (सं: निदा फ़ाज़ली) (Daagh Dehalvi: A School of Ghazal (Ed. Nida Fazli))
14. Foundation's Edge (Isaac Asimov) (reread)
15. Foundation and Empire (Isaac Asimov)
16. Foundation and Earth (Isaac Asimov)
17. शिकायत मुझे भी है (हरिशंकर परसाई) (tr. I Too Have A Complaint (Harishankar Parsai))
18. The Caves of Steel (Isaac Asimov)
19. Complete Fictions (Jorge Luis Borges)
20. Nemesis (Isaac Asimov)
21. दोज़ख़नामा (रबिशंकर बल (अमृता बेरा)) (tr. Chronicles of Hell (Rabishankar Bal (Amrita Bera)))
22. 2001: A Space Odyssey (Arthur C Clarke)
23. Lords of Finance (Liaquat Ahmed)
24. Why Nations Fail? (Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson)
25. Flash Boys (Michael Lewis)
26. Portnoy's Complaint (Philip Roth)
27. अभी, बिलकुल अभी (केदारनाथ सिंह) (tr. Now, Just Now (Kedarnath Singh))
28. Man Tiger (Eka Kurniawan)
29. Submission (Michel Houellebecq)
30. Horse Walks Into a Bar (David Grossman)

Megamore Recent Acquisitions

Featuring:

1. Submission (Michel Houellebecq)
2. R Packages (Hadley Wickham)
3. The Competent Authority (Shovon Chowdhary)
4. Analysis of Financial Time Series (Ruey Tsay)
5. R for Data Science (Hadley Wickham and Garrett Grolemund)
6. Convergence of Probability Measures (Patrick Billingsley)
7. क्या भूलूँ क्या याद करूँ (हरिवंश राय बच्चन) (tr. What to remember what to forget (Harivansh Rai Bachchan))
8. सोनम गुप्ता बेवफ़ा नहीं है (अनिल यादव) (tr. Sonam Gupta is not a cheat (Anil Yadav))
9. आकारों के आसपास (कुंवर नारायण) (tr. In the vicinity of shapes (Kunwar Narayan))
10. A Horse Walks Into A Bar (David Grossman)
11. If On A Winter's Night A Traveler (Italo Calvino)
12. The Sellout (Paul Beatty)
13. The Vegetarian (Han Kang)
14. On Anarchism (Noam Chomsky)

The Child is Grown, The Dream is Gone. Not.

Featuring:

1. The Three-Body Problem (Cixin Liu)
2. Portnoy's Complaint (Philip Roth)
3. Invisible Planets: Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction in Translation (tr. Ken Liu)
4. Man Tiger (Eka Kurniawan)
5. Vampire in Love (Enrique Vila-Matas)
6. अभी, बिलकुल अभी (केदारनाथ सिंह) (tr. Now, Just Now (Kedarnath Singh))
7. खिलेगा तो देखेंगे (विनोद कुमार शुक्ल) (tr. Will See When Blooms (Vinod Kumar Shukla))
8. तट पर हूँ पर तटस्थ नहीं (कुंवर नारायण) (tr. On The (Shore)Line But Not Neutral (Kunwar Narayan))
9. The Peripheral (William Gibson)

Evermore Recent Acquisitions

Featuring:

1. Linear Algebra and its Applications (Gilbert Strang)
2. Analysis I (Terence Tao)
3. Analysis II (Terence Tao)
4. Asset Pricing (John Cochrane)
5. The Essential Chomsky (Noam Chomsky) 
6. Probability and Measure (Patrick Billingsley)
7. Functional Analysis (Walter Rudin)
8. Introduction to Topology and Modern Analysis (George Simmons)
9. The Idea of Justice (Amartya Sen)
10. Flash Boys (Michael Lewis)
11. Poor Economics (Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo)
12. The Blind Watchmaker (Richard Dawkins)

Inverse TASWOSAW continued

From Tridev (1989), written by Anand Bakshi:

गली गली में फिरता है

तू क्यों बन के बंजारा?

आ मेरे दिल में बस जा

मेरे आशिक़ आवारा

तेरा प्यार है इक सोने का

पिंजड़ा ओ शहज़ादी

मुझको अपनी जान से प्यारी

है अपनी आज़ादी

You roam in streets and alleys

Having become a wanderer

Come live in my heart

My lover philanderer

Your love is but a golden

Confinement o princess

Lovelier than my life

Is my own egress

...

... just not evenly distributed

There is a striking regularity with which the state of science fiction literature in a society could predict its stage of economic development. Modern science fiction appeared in Victorian England post Industrial Revolution—a period of heady growth and technological innovation. The golden age of classical American Science Fiction was during the '50s and '60s (dominated by Asimov, Clark and Heinlein)—the halcyon days of the American economy when growth was high, inequality low and (thanks to the Cold War) disruptive technologies swept the nation.

And hence the strides that Chinese Science Fiction has taken in recent times comes as no surprise. The massively acclaimed trilogy: the Three Body Problem by Liu Cixin won him a Hugo recently. Another Chinese macroeconomist-cum-science-fiction-writer (yay!) Hao Jinfang won the Hugo this year, beating Stephen King (yes!) for her book Folding Beijing. 

The role that online publishing has played in this growth is especially well captured in this Foreign Policy piece published early this year: How China Became a Sci-Fi Powerhouse. 

Of course, since this is China, every aspect is mega-scale:

Much of the interest in science fiction within China is now driven by film and television companies, say writers and editors. China’s fast-growing media and entertainment industry is already worth about $180 billion, and companies are eager to capitalize on the burgeoning enthusiasm for sci-fi stories. A September 2016 article in Chinese outlet Today’s Headlines speaks of a “science fiction film investment fever.” It mentions that 85 sci-fi related film projects were undertaken in China in the first eight months of 2016 alone.

South China Morning Post also highlighted this issue a while back while featuring Hao Jingfang (among others) in Hong Kong's first science fiction conference. 

Hao Jingfang works as an economic researcher for the China Development Research Foundation think tank, so her research informs and inspires her writing.

“Half of the theme [of my writing] concerns social systems, their history and future development. The other half concerns philosophical aspects, such as human agency and willpower,” Hao says. 

For example, her award-winning novelette Folding Beijing addresses the inequality perpetuated by the social and economic system. The story takes place in a futuristic Beijing that is divided into three time dimensions. Protagonist Lao Dao travels illegally between dimensions to raise school fees for his adopted daughter. The story idea stemmed from a conversation Hao had with a taxi driver in Beijing, who had to spend a whole night queueing to get his child into kindergarten.

Do read the whole at: Science fiction’s new golden age in China. 

Thick at the center of all this action is Ken Liu—the translator of both Cixin and Hao—and is profiled in South China Morning Post's: How novelist Ken Liu is bringing Chinese sci-fi to the Western world.

The conspicuous successes of Liu Cixin and Hao have made Ken Liu the unofficial cheerleader for Chinese science fiction on the global stage. This status will only be enhanced by the recently released Invisible Planets, an anthology of short stories compiled and edited by Liu, from some of China’s leading science-fiction authors.

Here is an explanation why societies experiencing high rates of growth and commotion see growth and innovation in their respective cultures' science fiction literature too. Again, since this is China, everything is mega-scale:

While grappling with cutting-edge technological develop­ment is nothing new, in science fiction or life, what distin­guishes China from the rest of the world is the sheer scale and speed of that change. “The industrial advances that took centuries in Western nations have occurred in roughly 30 years,” he says. “Within the space of two generations, you have families where the parents lived an existence essentially like the 19th century and their children are now in Beijing working at some of the most advanced technological companies in the world.”

Here is the link to Ken Liu's latest offering (Amazon): Invisible Planets, 13 Visions of the Future: Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction. Highly recommended of course!

... 

On the basis of all this, could one predict that the stage is set for an inexorable rise in the profile of Indian science fiction? After all, in terms of growth rate and technological disruption, India certainly ranks very high; and in NF's humble opinion, that it will continue to do so in the foreseeable future is an almost mathematical certainty. 

There's certainly some evidence to that hypothesis. It is in this respect that the following HT article assumes some significance. It showcases the rise of digital publishing and its enabling push in helping speed up the expansion of an erstwhile niche maket—in both literary and science fictional capacities. Published early this year and titled A host of new digital literary magazines are giving a boost to India’s literary magazine culture, it profiles the founders of these exciting new voices in Indian publishing.

India has always been in the back seat when it comes to a literary-magazine culture. In fact, Brooklyn borough of New York boasts of more literary magazines than the whole of India.

But lately a host of new digital ventures are trying to change that.

Much like acclaimed literary magazines such as The Paris Review, The New Yorker and London Review of Books, these new online lit-magazines are named after cities or regions -- The Bombay Review, The Bangalore Review, The Madras Mag, Mithila Review, etc.

Visually appealing, these magazines publish high quality work – art, essays, fiction, non- fiction, poetry – merging genres, forms and realities.

In particular, the Mithila Review, published from Delhi, is leading the charge on the science fiction/fantasy front and has received a thumbs up from the mighty Bruce Sterling himself! 

Here is the link to their 9th issue: Mithila Review: Issue 9. Follow the link and salivate!

So given this simplistic model, what's the prognostication regarding the Indian SF scene in say, 10-15 years? NF won't be shy to wager a small sum for the case for a high growth rate in the segment—even more so in the numerous Indian languages than in English. If you can't wait for the future to happen right-friggin'-now, you have company. Bravo you guys!