Dinosaurs, India, and the smartphone

We in the United States  recently enjoyed a three-day weekend, ostensibly for the purpose of honoring fallen soldiers, though I suspect for most it's just an occasion to shop and cook out before the summer heat becomes unbearable.  I took advantage of the time off to read a few books:  India Connected, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs, and Change Agent, the latter of which has been  reviewed already.   A few more novels are in the offing, including Trouble is my Business (Raymond Chandler), Kill Decision (Suarez), Altered Carbon, and Limited Wish, the sequel to One World Kill.

First, the dinosaurs: as its title indicates, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs is a complete-as-possible history of our Saurian predecessors that focuses special attention on why and how they became such supersized creatures, as well as the demise of most of their kind.  I say most because Brusatte argues that birds did not evolve from dinosaurs, but are literally dinosaurs.   The development of feathers and particularly wings is addressed. The author believes wings first developed for display purpose, and feathers for insulation.   Although remains of feathers have not been found with any T-Rex fossils,  other tyrannosaurs (from small to large)  were feathered, so it's a fair bet that Rex was as well.

Next up,  India Connected. Global civilization is in the midst of change driven by the smartphone,  but nowhere does it have more explosive potential than in India.   The world’s largest democracy may be increasingly wealthy, but many millions of its people remain illiterate and impoverished.   Enter the smartphone, increasingly affordable even to the poorest.  Apps allow the rural villager to teach himself to read; they allow women  freedom to obtain information and look for opportunities for education, employment, and romance that would be otherwise warded away from them;  they allow those who can already read to learn new skills, like English and coding,   and they make it easier for people and India's vast democracy to function.   (And then there's dating..) 

Our Time Has Come

Our Time Has Come: How India is Making Its Place in the World 
©  2018 Alyssa Ayres
360 pages

The India of the 21st century is more than  the word's back office;  by some measures, it has already overtaken Japan as the world's third largest economy,  and as the world's second largest country,  its expansion has only begun, with millions more Indians waiting to rise from poverty.   Our Time Has Come is written not by an Indian national, but by an American student who first visited the world's largest democracy in the early nineties, and saw India's transformation as it moved away from the failures of socialism and embraced both greater freedom for its citizens, and the technologies of the future.  Now a senior fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations, Ayres reviews the way that India has established a growing role for itself as a world power, and makes recommendations for US policy.

India is less a new power than an old power made new again, Ayres points out in an introductory chapter which reviews the former economic weight of India some two thousand years ago.  India, like China, has a long memory --   and as a postcolonial nation, India's pride in its own heritage is made stronger by determination not to enveloped by another power once more.   Although Ayres has a section on India's growing economic importance in the world,  I found India's strategic and diplomatic expansion far more interesting.    India sees itself as reclaiming its former role as a world leader, and is careful to protect its independence.  It has an especially interesting role at the United Nation, where it's quite supportive of peacekeeping missions and democracy-building....but reliably refrains from voting for measures which single out one nation or another for abuse, viewing such measures was non-constructive.  India also refrains from taking up joint efforts with other nations on a private basis -- preferring missions under the UN flag. (Speaking of which, India is stretching its legs militarily, and intends to establish itself as the predominant power in the Indian Ocean.) Ayers stresses that DC should approach India as a partner, not an ally who will necessarily support DC's every move:   India and DC's interests will align more often than not, but respecting India's need for independence is crucial to building a healthy relationship.    Related is the recommendation that DC adopt the practice of consulting India on a habitual basis when working in the region  -- both for its intelligence resources and to build a relationship of mutual trust that makes diplomacy between the two more reflexive and open than occasional and formal.  More controversially,  Ayers recommends that instead of trying to balance focus on Pakistan and India that DC double down on India.  Pakistan is an unreliable partner in the best of times, and now that the Afghan war appears to be winding down (knock on wood), it may be possible to take this advice.  One disconcerting tidbit in this book is China's chilly regard towards India; while India is eager to move forward in trade and cooperation, China is far less amicable.

Although I found this book quite interesting,  I'm an admitted foreign policy wonk. It's quite readable, but it goes into a lot of details that might put readers with just a vague curiosity about India off.

Highlights:
"Pakistan sees any sign of Indian involvement with Afghanistan as a threat to its own interests, and as a result has refused to allow India transit access to Afghanistan and beyond—even though connecting Afghans to the region’s largest market would help stabilize Afghanistan’s economy and bring much-needed economic security to the entire region."

"When the Bush Administration made its breakthrough with India in 2005–2006, some in the Administration and many beyond hoped that India might become effectively allied with the U.S. in its foreign and defense policy. That was an illusion. We can now see clearly that India, a great civilization with thousands of years of history and the self-confidence that comes with it, will pursue its own interests as a 21st century great power. We will not become formal treaty allies. We’ll align on many issues, but we will not be 'aligned.'"

Related:
Brave New World: India, China, and the United States, Anja Manuel. Another foreign policy guide, but this one appraises both India and China's merits and weaknesses, and stresses that DC need to tread carefully in not favoring one over the other. I really need to properly review this one this year, because it was a favorite.

The Wonder That Was India

The Wonder That Was India
© 1959 Arthur Llewellyn Basham
586 pages

For the past few weeks I’ve been enjoying The Wonder That Was India, a Will Durant-like survey of Indian history and culture prior to the Mughal invasion.  Its opening section covers political history, from the first hints of settled human life through several empires and many periods of fragmentation.  In sections that follow, Basham focuses on society, daily life, economics, art, literature,  religion, philosophy, and metaphysics.  Evolution is a recurring theme; the flowering of languages and religions being the most obvious examples of institutions' varied growth through time. He notes, for instance, that the intermix of Buddhism and Zoroastrianism produced strains of Buddhist thought that looked for a future Buddha, one who would be greater even than Siddhartha Gautama. Basham writes in earnest admiration of Indian civilization, which managed get by without having institutionalized mass slavery – unlike the Roman empire, for instance. The author's pen has a warm elegance that made the sheer amount of information easy to contemplate, and his commentary shed a good bit of light on various subjects for me. For instance, he commented that one reason histories are generally so sketchy about India before Ashoka is that there's little written surviving history to work with.  His own sources for the period were limited; one history applied only to Kashmir, and another was more religious than historical.

Midnight's Furies

Midnight's Furies: The Deadly Legacy of India's Partition
© 2015 Nisid Hajari
352 pages

Although greater India has rarely remained united in its long history, there was every reason to hope that it would emerge from the centuries of British dominion in one piece. Instead, the people of India erupted as two -- then three -- nations,  with armed borders and bloodbaths between them.   Midnight's Furies is a history of how the Partition happened, and a full account of the massacres on every side until the United Nations was able to meditate a cease-fire.  Although its pages are bloodsoaked, no less  than a history of the fighting and civilian slaughters between Hitler and Stalin's empires in WW2,  it does deliver a sad understanding of why tensions between India and Pakistan continue to haunt the region and the world.

The two most prominent personalities of this tale are Jawaharlal Nehru, a key figure in both the independence movement and India's Congress Party, and Muhammad Ali Jinnah,  also a leading voice in the movement but one who relied on Muslim support.  Although both Nehru and Jinnah supported a future for India as a secular state,  the long road to independence and personal quarreling made them feuding allies at best, and rivals at worse.  Gandhi gave the Indian independence movement a strong populist flavor; his supporters were not middle-class Indians, but India's poor masses, and the Mahatma and his followers channeled their desires and energy through Hindu religion. This was exceptionally  off-putting to Jinnah, who not only feared Hindu nationalism given his Muslim background, but had a marked distaste for the underclass, reluctant even to shake hands with his followers. As the movement grew larger and more populist, Jinnah was marginalized and found relevance only by doubling-down on his Muslim background and becoming an stubborn voice for a Muslim state that would protect its citizens' wishes against the Hindu majority.

Although Nehru comes off much better here (confronting the leaders of mass violence, dreaming of a united India)  Hajari does delve into his culpability. As the day of withdrawal grew closer and Indian leadership became a fact, not a proposal,  Nehru targeted his critical energies against Jinnah's partisanship with the same zeal he'd once thrown at the British.  In treating Jinnah  and his followers like the enemy, he aided the two countries' downward spiral of accusation, attack, and counterattack.  The bloodbath that overtook the country  when the Partition came into effect -- as majorities tried to push minorities out -- was not exactly their 'fault', but their inability to work with one another set the stage. (Jinnah's call for "Direct Action" to effect Pakistani independence from India kicked off the blood feud, however, so he seems more culpable than Nehru.)  The violence was not a simply Hindu v Muslim feud;  in the Punjab, where the new state line split the militant Sikh community in two,  it involved Sikhs and Muslims.   The ever-present spiral of violence is obvious here: one community attacks the other ,who attacks the first in self-defense, who attacks the other in reprisal, etc.  The aggression and violence simply keep ratcheting up, until the streets are literally filled with broken bodies, including children, and air is filled with the smell of  blood and the cry of wounded and raped victims.

This is not a book for the faint of heart, though it's not as gruesome as The Rape of Nanking.  Although ending in 1947,  the spasm of brutality documented here continues to effect Indian and Pakistani relations, and particularly Pakistan's foreign-policy worldview. For it, India remains the existential threat and the priority -- not cold wars or terrorism.

A New History of India

A New History of India
© 2000, sixth edition Stanley Wolpert
471 pages

India isn't an easy place to keep running. Stanley Wolpert's A New History of India gives a chiefly-political, mostly-modern history of one of the world's most ancient civilizations, a land whose soaring mountains and depth of peoples have frustrated long-term attempts at centralized control.  Beyond a geographic introduction,  and some early  content on  Indian religion, culture, and literature,  A New History largely delivers a story of rulers and killings.    The Indian subcontinent seems to have been riven in war for most of its history,  with occasional figures like Ashoka and Akbar rising to reign over largish- and stable-ish parts of the north.   This pattern of central authority giving way to chaos, then back to authority again, has a heart-like rhythm about it.  British India  receives the lion's share of attention (both the accretion of British authority, and the Quit India campaign)  and as the book draws closer to the 'modern' period, the author gets saucier.  In the section on WW2, for instance,  he refers to the Japanese catching the British at Singapore with their gin-and-tonics half-down.   This particular edition covers India (and Pakistan) up to the year 1999, but later editions cover India until until 2008.  Frankly, I found the running commentary on India in Nehru's Glimpses of World History  far more useful as far as pre-modern history goes.   This reminded me a bit of The Persians: Ancient, Medieval, and Modern Iran  in its near-solitary fixation on rulers, deaths, and successions.

I think I may follow this with  Nehru's own The Discovery of India, the name of which I am borrowing for this Discovery of Asia inquiry into Indian and Chinese history.

The Elephant and the Dragon

The Elephant and the Dragon: The Rise of India and China and What It Means for All of Us
© 2007  Robyn Meredith
272 pages

For most of the 20th century, Europe and the United States enjoyed an outsided influence on global trade, in part because  large portions of the world had sealed themselves off, stewing in their own ideological juices and maintaining impoverished populations. As the 20th began to give way to the 21st, however,  the eastern world re-opened. The Elephant and the Dragon begins with a historical note explaining how China and India came to renew their participation in the global economy, then appraises the ways their surging involvement has altered that global system and themselves.  Written and published before the 'great recession' -- observing then things now taken for granted, like offshoring -- the book is presumably not quite as relevant as it was on its publication.  The fundamental transformations Meredith observes, however, are still in effect.

Why the 'elephant and the tiger', instead of 'the Asian tigers'?  Meredith views India's economy as pachydermesque in that while it was slow to get to its feet, slower still to get moving,  it will be all the more harder to stop as it picks up speed.  Its energy will come not from one point -- the Politburo -- but from billions of Indians, driving forward towards the future they want.   India's economic revival came seemingly as a last resort, when in 1992 its leadership recognized that the country was broke.  Although the liberalization that followed allowed India to use its existing resources (a strong number of English-speaking professionals) to better effect,  its lack of more material resources -- infrastructure like highways and modern airports -- prevented it from becoming an instant industrial power like China.   India liberalized at just the right time,  becoming an important part of the expanding information technology sector.  What began with the dot come surge  has continued to the point that India had become the western world's "back office". its workers supplying customer service ,tech support,  computer programming, and the like.  By now (2017), India's economy has grown being merely the support staff of the west, however.

China's own 'liberalization' -- economic, not political -- began in 1978 when Mao's successor realized the middle kingdom was falling far behind the west,  and needed to adopt some of its methods if only out of self defense. (Even during the Mao years, China had learned from Russia's mistakes and so avoided total public control of agriculture.)   Although the communist party's pivot towards capitalism meant ceding constant command of the economy, the Party maintains absolute political control and still 'guides' the economy by establishing long-term goals, like an expansion of the highway system.  Although westerners commonly regard China's trade advantage as being desperately cheap labor, in reality there are many places with cheaper labor.  China combines relatively cheap labor with industrial infrastructure and a government interested in stable growth.

The Elephant and the Dragon is largely oriented toward the world of business, using India and China to illustrate how crucial offshoring and vast supply chains have become to the global economy.  Goods are not simply made in a Chinese factory; they pass from city to city in varying stages of completeness, which is why online retailers can offer so much customization.  "Made in" labels have lost all real meaning, for a given good will have been produced from goods and materials from across Asia, with other components added in by the United States and Europe.  Is a car finished in the United States, but from parts produced in China and Mexico, truly 'made in America'?  

While there are more current books, for someone interested in the course of globalization -- particularly the intermingling of the Asia and western economies -- this is still a good start.

In Spite of the Gods

In Spite of the Gods: the Rise of Modern India
© 2007 Edward Luce
400 pages

In Spite of the Gods appraises India’s culture as its ancient civilization enters the 21st century as the world’s largest democracy and one of its largest economies.  Its author, Edward Luce, lived in New Delhi for years as the bureau chief for the Financial Times, and traveled throughout India for reports and interviews.   While This Brave New World  evaluated how quickly and thoroughly India was approaching the ‘standards’ of modernity (public health, political and economic participation, etc),  In Spite of the Gods  looks more broadly at how India’s deeply-rooted culture is digesting the momentous changes of the 21st century.  I say digesting because the author holds the view of many that India’s culture has the strength of the ages; it is ancient, diverse, and resilient. It does not collapse in the face of change; it incorporates aspects of change while preserving itself, rather like Buddhism was digested into Hinduism, changing it but not prevailing over it.

  This book is never far from the person and work of Jawaharlal Nehru, who jokingly referred to himself as the last Englishman to rule India.   Nehru was India’s first prime minister after independence, and because so many of the other founding generation died within a few years of achieving their goal, he played an outsized role in shaping the legacy of independence.   Nehru’s statement can be considered seriously not just because he was educated in England, but its modernity shaped his mind and character;  while Gandhi’s vision for India was framed within its own tradition, Nehru’s was more of an English intellectual, a westerner: his view of progress involved massive factories, a state-administered economy, secularism, and so on – not village anarchy and Hindu tradition.   Nehru lives in India not simply through his family, who are invariably involved in national-level politics, but because his legacy is continually tested.

 Nehru’s economic legacy is slowly but surely being discarded, for instance, plank by plank; the “license Raj” that he and his descendants established to ensure that India’s economy didn’t become another outpost of western capitalists has indeed done its work of preventing outside investment in India…but that is increasingly not something people want, and had the further effect of squelching growth within India.  Only when the Raj began being dismantled in the early 1990s did India join China as one of the “Asian Tigers”.     Nehru’s secular vision is likewise being tested by the healthy support of Hindu nationalist organizations.   The essential problem there, Luce maintains, is ethnic-religious nationalism set against India’s diversity will create nothing but partisan reaction and more trouble.  This book was published years before  the election which brought Prime Minister Modi  -- representing a nationalist party – to power.   While Luce presents the BJP as only an ethno-nationalist party, whom he likens to the fascists in their focus on  the tribe and their gods,   another author (Manuel, This Brave New World) attributed the BJP’s success to Indians’ desire for more economic freedom.

Luce covers much else;  the persistent influence of caste, for instance,  which Gandhi deplored and which the ‘untouchables’ continue attempting to escape from via politics and religion.  Likewise, he devotes a chapter to the mythic important of The Village in the Indian imagination, where it is not simply an artifact from the past but infused with the same spiritual importance the west used to place in families and the polis.  Luce notes that much of India’s economic growth has in fact been nurtured by cottage firms that don’t necessarily need metropolises and big factories, and that Nehru’s fixation on massive capital hobbled India with debt at a time when her people  didn’t have an economy to handle it. There is much else to say,  but in short – In Spite of the Gods is compelling for outside audiences who are trying to understand India’s role in the global community. It’s more personal and gossipy than Brave New World, but I would read the two books in tandem.

Looking ahead & some also-reads

I intentionally launched this year off with some fun reading, so we're off to a good start and there's more on the way.  Yesterday Amazon held a flash sale for science books, and I picked up a few relatively recent releases for the princely sum of $7.   

Read but not reviewed this month have been:

Ask a Science Teacher, a collection of  250 science columns written in response to reader-submitted questions, Many of the initial questions were solicited from schoolrooms, and the book as a whole is targeted to a younger audience -- anywhere from late elementary to early high school, I would think. I found it interesting enough, but laced with corny jokes.

India in the Global Community, P. Paramundi Karan. A brief introduction to India, which I read to grease the rails for a larger and more substantial history. This little book covered geography, politics, industry, religion, culture, diplomacy, etc. all in different chapters. The tone and bounty of photos suggest it was written for younger audiences, like middle school. For whatever reason it was cataloged with my library's adult nonfiction, though, and I stumbled upon it while shelving books.  While it covers a great deal, it's all very superficial. The chapter on political history, for instance, mentions the Aryans, then disorder; Asoka, then disorder; the Mughals, then disorder; the Brits, and then Gandhi & Nehru, followed by several wars with Pakistan.

Coming up this week: a review for another science  book read this week, a possible review for a digital enterprise book, Asian history, and more in my developing "good news for the future" theme.  So far I'm including In the City of Bikes, the Big Necessity, On Bicycles, and The Mesh as part of that series.

Also, last night I watched Bladerunner, which I thought would be a Reads to Reels post. As it happened, the movie references were all subtle, like the offworld settlements and the fake owl. The only major plot element was the lead character's quest to retire some replicants, but one of the best scenes in the book was a no-show.  I didn't mind the abstinence of Mercerism, though.  I found it an odd movie, presumably one that improves upon repeated viewings. 

The Big Necessity

The Big Necessity: the Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why it Matters
© 2008, 2014 Rose George
238 pages

In its initial publication, The Big Necessity may have been an eye-opening look into how many human beings still suffer for want of life-saving sanitation. Already familiar with the sorry state of toilet affairs in parts of the global south, though, I read and enjoyed this more as the story of governments, charitable organizations, private citizens, and small businesses who are steadily working to bring their places to health. The solution is not always technological, although reading about home digesters that convert offal into kitchen gas and fancy Japanese toilets is most interesting. (The digesters are particularly important: not only do they give households a degree of self-sufficiency, they guard against local trees being stripped for fuel, and save China's rural households money in terms of domestic fuel and fertilizer.) A culture of hygiene must always be fostered, and through means that take into account the local culture. The Big Necessity provides a call to arms,  takes readers into the sewers of NYC and London as well as the  Chinese countryside, and offers a view of toiletry's cutting edge. A very interesting book all around, then, and with only the faintest whiff of toilet humor -- the sole instance of which is that George refers to something as execrable.


George is also the author of Ninety Percent of Everything, known in the UK as Deep Sea and Foreign Going: Inside Shipping.


Related:
Flushed! How the Plumber Saved Civilization, W. Hodding Carter

In the Land of the Tiger

In the Land of the Tiger: A Natural History of the Indian Subcontinent
© 1997 Valmik Thapar
285 pages

Imagine a Planet Earth episode focused entirely on India, and then presented in book form. The result is In the Land of the Tiger, which takes readers on a guide through the lush natural landscape of the Indian subcontinent, starting from the mountains and following the rivers to the coast, from there visiting islands before examining other disparate areas of the land.  This volume is replete both with photos and picturesque writing, displaying a soul-stirring variety of animals. Many I had no idea existed, like   the Hoolock gibbon, India's only ape,  and the pied hornbill.  The expanse of human settlement has pushed many animals into new territories and created interesting adapational behavior: for instance,  although lions typically hunt in prides,  those who live in India's forested margins must become solo artists. There are also elephants who swim in the open sea between different island. (There is an extraordinary shot of an elephant swimming, taken from below. Talk about perilous photography!)    Land of the Tiger makes more cultural references than Planet Earth or related series did, connecting animals to Hindu religion and folk medicines.   I've been slowly guiding through this the past few days, savoring the photos and writing -- what a great start for the Discovery of Asia series!

When I finished this book I noticed that Land of the Tiger  was actually a BBC nature series. I was more on the nose than I realized!

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Glimpses of World History

Glimpses of World History
© 1942 Jawaharlal Nehru
1192 pages

In 1930,  a man who would later become the first prime minister of India was thrown in jail for a period of two years. There, removed from his family and regretful that he was forcibly absent from his daughter Indira's life, Jawaharlal Nehru labored to impart what wisdom he could through a series of letters. Beginning in October 1930 and ending in August 1933, the letters -- written in a loving and erudite pen -- cover the whole of the human story, from prehistory 'til the "present day" of 1938.   Composed from memory, notes, love for his daughter, and fervent if beleaguered hope for humanity, Glimpses is an extraordinary collection.

Of course, their author was an extraordinary man.  I first encountered him some six years ago, when I watched the film Gandhi and found him such  a sympathetic figure that I read his biography and became utterly transfixed by him. Most striking was a story his biographer, Shashi Tharoor shared -- that Nehru was so unnerved by his support in office that he wrote an anonymous letter warning people to be more skeptical -- "Nehru has all the makings of a dictator...we want no Caesars" .  Having read Glimpses, having spent upwards of a month with Nehru, reading these intimate letters to his daughter,  I can more readily believe that he wrote such a thing.   Here was a man whose deep appreciation for human history allowed him to create from memory and notes, an epic history of the world without recourse to a library -- who would, in the progress of the letters, continually connect them to one another in one fabric of historical reflections.  He was as conversant with the weaknesses and pains of the human experience as the potential and glory. 

Glimpses reminded me much of H.G.Wells' Outline of History, and this is no accident; Nehru quotes it a few times, using it as one of his sources. While Wells and Nehru share a common worldview, however -- scientifically centered and politically progressive, the two combining in a ready belief that science was on the precipice of conquering politics and economics with state socialism --  Nehru writes more broadly of the world.  Not surprisingly, India and  Southeast Asia are at the book's heart. Even when writing on other topics, like Ireland's perennial fight with England,  allusions to India are common.. These connections are partially the result of him writing as teacher to his daughter, but as he admits the letters serve him as well, allowing him to reflect and inwardly digest the lessons of history. As an actor in India's ongoing drama for independence, no doubt there are lessons he hopes to apply in practice. He also draws out these lessons in contradiction, contrasting "priest-ridden" India with  China, which he views as more rationalistic even in antiquity.  (Again with Wells, Nehru is not a fan of organized religion,  largely viewing it as nothing more than elaborate conspiracy to keep people from thinking about being poor. He does not blame it for every ill of the world, however, referring to it often being used as the mere cover for more mundane conflicts.)

What does Glimpses offer the modern reader?  For starters, Nehru's history regularly visits India, southeast Asia, and the middle east in a way that westerners at least probably do not encounter. I have never read about India colonialism, for instance, and have only encountered Persian history post-Sassanids when I  sought it out deliberately.  There is the virtue of novelty, then, but Nehru makes this all the more valuable by relentlessly chronicling areas' histories in connection with one another; they're not disjointed. Even when Nehru is forced to make sudden jumps, he offers recaps and reviews to remind his daughter, of what we discussed previously. (Considering that there are nearly two hundred letters, this is especially helpful.)     There is also Nehru's teaching style to consider. This is not an academic history, but the counsel of a parent to a child, and it is therefore tender. When he devotes four chapters to the trade crisis and Great Depression, one suspects he is writing more for his own benefit, but Nehru frequently stops chronicling to reflect. It is here when he is musing on the lessons these recollections to have teach us that Nehru sounds most loving, most wise.  He is a pleasure to listen to, to spend time with, and this is an invaluable attribute for an author.  Even if a reader disagrees with a man, it is possible to listen to him, take him seriously, and earnestly reason together with him -- if he is a sympathetic author. If he is a boor bellowing in confrontation,  there is neither wisdom nor argument to find, only courage in one's prejudices. 

Nehru is no boor -- and neither is he a bore.  While Nehru was a political figure, his history does not limit itself to politics; he frequently dwells on literature, architecture, and poetry, frequently including verses for his daughter's consideration.  (He also includes tables of trade and population statistics, because fifteen year olds eat that stuff up.) Obviously, I prefer Gandhi's strident village anarchism to any sort of state-centered scheme, but Nehru isn't an extremist. He writes of science that humility goes hand in hand with knowledge, as every discovery only creates further questions. He exhibits that humility most of the time, frequently chronicling the unintended consequences of government actions and the chronic moral frailties of man. If Nehru has a blind spot, it  is authoritarian socialism, and particularly his enamored take on Stalin. While the author is happy to accept Roosevelt's tinkering with the American economy as a kind of socialism, he declares that Hitler's tinkering with the German economy had nothing at all to do with socialism despite its "National Socialism" name.  Both were using the state to 'buffer' the economy on behalf of :"Society", so -- what's the difference?  

The big difference between Nehru's writing on Stalinism and his writing in the hundreds of pages before is that with Stalin, he is writing on the present, without benefit of hindsight.  I imagine that if Nehru were to live in our own time, he would present a view of Stalinism -- and Maoism, and Pol Potism, and Juche, and the other variations which have killed and enslaved many millions in the 20th century --  that is more critical,  his being able to see the consequences from afar.  I do not believe his love for the common man would be diminished in the least, nor would his hope. This was a man who concluded his letters in the 1930s, when Japan and Germany stood astride the world, when the democracies were ailing and impotent, when India still languished under foreign domination -- and yet he urged his daughter to not take a dismal view of the world:

For history teaches us of growth and progress and of the possibility of an infinite advance for man; and life is rich and varied, and though it has many swamps and marshes and muddy places, it has also the great sea, and the mountains, and snow, and glaciers,  and wonderful starlight nights (especially in gaol!), and the love of family and friends and the comradeship of workers in common cause, and music, and books, and the empire of ideas. So that each of us may well say: -- 'Lord, though I lived on earth, the child of earth, Yet was I fathered by the starry sky''.

Glimpses was a book, for me, six years in the waiting, and worth the waiting.  I hope to spend more time with Nehru in his Discovery of India. 

Lost Enlightenment

Lost Enlightenment: Central Asia's Golden Age from the Arab Conquest to Tamerlane 
© 2015 S. Frederick Starr
618 pages

Lost Enlightenment takes readers back to a time when Central Asia was the crossroads of the world, a hub of both commercial and activity. Here are celebrated the lives of cities which, in this time, were hosts to capitals, universities, and more.  Now they are dust, at best eroded columns in a desolate landscape. In Lost Enlightenment, readers follow Starr east to Baghdad, Merv, and a few other jewels. Though he touches on the political highlights of the region between the Arab conquest and the death of Tamerlane, they are important here only as far as their role in fostering the  arts and sciences.    Although diminished slightly by the complete lack of maps -- and in Central Asia, surrounded by the great mass of Eurasia, there are precious few borders to define the area --  Lost Enlightenment is a weighty accomplishment.

Most readers have heard of the 'silk road', though much more than silk traveled its routes. The sheer bounty of thinkers and creators here, many of them polymaths and 'renaissance men'  -- though with no need for the renaissance bit.  Starr marks the beginning of this enlightened period with the Arabic invasion, but not because the Arabs came bestowing wisdom among the poor benighted natives. The area was already culturally rich and commercially sophisticated, and its geography frustrated any attempt at sustained conquests. Thus the Islamic Arabs and Central Asians of diverse ethnicities and religions --  Buddhists, Christians ,and Zoroastrians just for starters --  lived with and engaged with one another, iron sharpening iron.   There, philosophies and religions from across Eurasia came together, drawn to the trade cities of Central Asia like a savanna water hole. (They were, literally, water holes -- most were near oases). Long used to weighing opposing ideas against one another, Central Asia even tolerated (at times) freethinkers who spoke out against virtually everyone. Here, in this intellectual marketplace of ideas, this constant mental competition, the arts and science flourished -- for a time.

What caused their end?  Something as complex as a society doesn't lend itself to easy answers, and there's no shortage of little things going wrong for the area of central Asia. The most obvious agent of downfall were the Mongols, who didn't merely raid civilization: they often destroyed it utterly.  Some regions lost an estimated 90% of their population, and those who were not murdered were driven away in fear.  Genghis Khan should be condemned by all mankind if only for his destruction of Baghdad,  then a shining city upon the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates, but he cut a bloody path jut getting there, leaving behind him ashes and blood-soaked dust. Khan emptied Central Asia, but even before that the arteries were hardening, people receptive to arguments made by theologian-intellectuals like al-Ghazali, who rebuked philosophical materialism in his Incoherence of the Philosophers.  This hardening meant that even when the leaders stumbled upon something revolutionary, like the printing press, it never flared into potency as it did in Europe.

Lost Enlightenment is a considerable survey, mostly intellectual and cultural with a pinch of politics. I certainly welcomed it,  knowing virtually nothing about this area. It is astonishing to hear of places like Afghanistan being hubs of civilized thought, but such is the way of history. Civilizations rise and fall, flower and perish.


* "Central Asians" seems as clumsily artificial as "Yugoslavians" , but the author uses it in lieu of anything better. I suppose it's easier than "Iranian-Turkic peoples".

The Space Between Us

The Space Between Us
© 2007 Thrity Umrigar
321 pages

"A hard land, yes, full of mountains, but toughness has its own beauty." p. 200

The Space Between Us is a modern Indian tragedy, told through the plight of two women who guide their families alone,  fighting despair and deceit.  Serabai and Bhima have spent much of their lives together, witnessing and consoling one another through crisis after crisis, but they remain alienated from the other by class -- for Bhima is Serabai's servant. Nothing illustrates their distance like the news that each is expecting a new grandchild; for Sera,  such a birth is a source of energy and excitement. For Bhima, it is the fount of despair.  Abandoned in life by her husband,  robbed of her children by disease, she has fallen from a modest apartment into the slums and sacrificed everything in the hope that her granddaughter Maya would succeed in college and go on to a comfortable life. Now that hope has fallen away,  and the aging grandmother must continue to bear the burden alone, caring for a pregnant college dropout.  As Bhima  struggles against physical exhaustion, poverty, and now a deep despair of the soul, Sera attempts to help her even while hindered by timidity in the face of customs of caste. This is not simply a story of the present, however, as much is delivered through the two women's reminiscences, stories from the past that add enormous meaning to their present struggles. As the past is unearthed, the reader who is drawn in by the enchanting prose is staggered by a final revelation that destroys what little hope and peace the characters have.  Umrigar has a talent for  throwing readers  not only into the desperate poverty of the Bombay slums, but into a dark night of the soul.  As past and present dance with one another, Bhima is steadily crushed, tortured as though she were thrown upon a medieval rack. The one consolation in this story is that she does not give up; her head is bloodied, but unbowed. It is a grim novel,  however, in which the high point is that the main character doesn't commit suicide.

Related:

• A Man in Full,  Tom Wolfe, in which another impoverished parent is ground beneath the heel of life, pushed beyond endurance, and finds some inner strength. 

The Story of My Experiments with Truth

The Story of my Experiments with Truth
 © 1927 Mohandas K. Gandhi
480 pages

Dover Press cover

The Story of my Experiments with Truth is a piecemeal autobiography of Mohandas Gandhi,  who earned acclaim by leading India to independence from the British Empire through nonviolent means. It includes only the early portions of his life, ending in the 1920s long before the most famous incidents of the Indian movement.   Gandhi establishes early on that he chose to downplay much discussion of his political activism in this work on the grounds that he had already written a history of his early struggles in South Africa, and that his later battles were so widely known they needed no further coverage from his pen.  Despite that intention, politics peppers this story of his life, as he viewed public service as inseparable from any other portion of his being, and especially from his sense of spirituality, the pursuit of truth. Politics was simply a means of acting on the truth, of proclaiming it to the world.

If not politics, what then is this autobiography?  Released in sections through a newsletter, it has no central focus;  his search for truth is at best a recurring theme. There's politics here, interwoven with the accounts of legal cases and the epic quest to find his ashram a hand loom (this merited two chapters), but his reflections on religion, spirituality, and ethics give the work most of its substance. The work allows readers to see the legend of the Mahatma slowly emerge from the life of a passionate Indian lawyer who seems beset by scrupulosity, constantly ashamed of his wretched failings, recoiling in horror from the great sins of marriage and drinking goat's milk.  Gandhi is not a moderate: after encountering a concept and deciding it worthy of an effort, the effort given is mighty: he adopts practices whole cloth. After being introduced to the concept of economic self reliance, he arranges for his newspaper staff to join him at a communal farm. When he became convinced of the spiritual and medical effects of total abstinence, he became celibate and began sleeping in a separate bed from his wife. Period. His ability to make radical changes in his life increased with practice: as a young man, avoiding meat seemed a terrible burden, one difficult to take up -- but a decade later, with much experience, he could declare war against his libido by refusing to engage in so much as an amorous thought, and developing a diet that wouldn't lead to excess 'interest'. (Meat and milk lead to sexy thoughts. Fruit, not so much. )  At the same time, he records some of his religious explorations, his reading of other sacred texts and comparing them to his own.  This was only a minor portion of the content, however.

Those interested in the formative years and experience of Gandhi may find this book of interest; it is also marginally useful to those seeking information about his South African years, in which he fought to help Indians relegated to indentured servitude reclaim their dignity before the law and before themselves.  It is not a cohesive work, however, and doesn't contain any extensive, in-depth writing on any given subject: instead, one sees the big ideas slowly developed over the course of his early life,  coming together year by year, a worldview given life one practice and one belief at a time.  Gandhi is at once inspiring and unsettling in the extremes of his life, dedicated to truth.

Related:
Nehru: the Invention of India; Shashi Tharoor
The Confessions,  St. Augustine (who was also given to literary self-flagellation)

Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet

Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet
352 pages
© 2008 Michael T. Klare

For much of the 20th century, a handful of industrialized countries enjoyed access to a seemingly infinite supply of oil. But a century of economic progress has seen global demand for oil soar. Ever more countries are scrambling for a bigger piece of the petroleum pie, and there's increasingly less to divide, while appetites the sticky sweet stuff have only just been whetted.  As nations scramble to find new oil deposits to replace those which they've already exhausted, the global balance of power has shifted. Formerly impoverished nations are now fat with wealth, and titans of the global economy have become increasingly anxious beggars on the verge of throwing punches. In Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet,  Michael Klare elaborates on why the global dependency on a resource with an unstable future is a growing threat to world peace and muses on how the great powers, old and new, can turn competitive tension into collaborative energy and prevent quests for energy security from becoming World War III.

Oil (and gas) are potent stuff.  The energy contained within them isn't limited to fuel for transportation: they can  and have brought back to life, Lazarus-style, failed states like Russia which capitalized on its ability to control the flow of fuel to Europe. They've also turned desert wastelands dotted with yurts into spectacles of affluence; goodbye tents, hello opulent towers and water fountains performing music.  This enormous wealth has been generated because global demand for oil is climbing at the same time that supplies are faltering:  the great wells have been drained, discoveries of new ones are falling, and wells are exhausted more quickly than they can found. In addition to our rapacious appetite for fuel wreaking havoc on the environment  (who needs mountains when you can have coal? Aw yeah.), they're not having a happy effect on global politics, either. Not only has the wealth and power given to Russia and the new petrostates been restricted to a relative few, with little of the wealth being invested back into their societies, but the few have used the power to strengthen their hand; petty tribal chiefs now have money and foreign militaries doing their oppressing for them. Which foreign militaries? Those of the United States, Russia, and China, the Big Three who are canvassing the globe in search of resources and playing games with whatever tinpot dictator they can pressure to give it to them -- from the Caspian Sea to Africa, and especially the Middle East. Although Klare's early chapters detail the rising demand for oil, most of the book is given to studying how various powers, the big three in addition to Japan,  India, and a few other states, are competing with one another in board rooms cutting deals, and increasingly on the edge of the battlefield. While no wars have erupted yet, Klare seems to think they're inevitable. His final chapter urges the powers to work together to solve their common problem of energy security, rather than wasting scarce resources trying to stave off the inevitable.

Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet is a book to read if you've any interest in global affairs and the future of energy. It's replete with data to impress (and horrify) your friends: did you know we'll have to double our production of oil to meet predicted demand by 2020?  (Considering that we've been reduced to smashing  greasy rocks together to find it, that's a fairly daunting challenge.) Klare is an engaging writer, making a discussion of production figures seem interesting; it helps that competition for them is causing so much conflict.  Given the importance of the subject, this is a book I think more people should read, but there are a couple of niggling problems: first, this book is four years out of date, and  so many of the facts may have changed.  Russia's Gazprom, for instance, isn't quite as intimidating now as it was in the book, and the new petrostates aren't wasting all of their oil money. Some nations on the Persian Gulf are investing in renewable energy in anticipation of the inevitable day that oil proves to be not magic and runs out, like every other resource.  Additionally, some of his advice seems a bit unhelpful, namely that suggestion that China and America collaborate to make more fuel-efficient cars; those meager contributions be dwarfed by the fact that both nations are aggressive car promoters and yearn for more automobile sales. These are trifling matters, though; the meat of the book is more than food for thought.

Our Oriental Heritage

The Story of Civilization: Our Oriental Heritage
© 1935 Will Durant
1048 pages

"Civilization is social order promoting cultural creation."  (Opening sentence.)

Our Oriental Heritage is the introductory volume of a greater work, an eleven-book set covering prehistory to the last days of Napoleon. Judging from the preface, Durant initially planned to write The Story of Civilization as a five-volume set that went beyond Napoleon, even approaching the 20th century. This first volume begins in prehistory, Durant spending time to comment on the evolution of civilization's economic, political, moral, and mental elements before beginning his trek proper with Sumeria. Egypt, Babylon, Assyria, Judea, Persia, India, China, and finally Japan follow. Although the majority of his subject nations have passed away into extinction, the latter three civilizations are still extant, and Durant follows their story up to the 'present day'.

Our Oriental Heritage is epic history: not only is the timeframe at hand vast, but Durant's approach is to tackle politics, religion, science, art, drama, and artisanry all together, giving his story depth as well as breadth. Despite the abundance of information, his presentation is never confusing. Sections are clearly delineated, and I enjoyed Durant's writing style: he's approachable, but dramatic, often waxing on eloquently about a particular poet, ruler, or philosophy. There's also occasional humor --  dry, of course, as historian humor tends to be.

Throughout Durant's work, civilizations rise and fall like waves crashing on a beachhead: they are born, he says, in stoicism, and perish in epicureanism. Those words are used chronically throughout the book, fading only in the last two general portions. I don't rightly understand that characteristic of his writing. While the misuse of epicureanism is understandable (being common, and objectionable only to people familiar with Epicures) as referring to powerful, rich states that grow sedentary in their success, slowly rotting inside before falling to a more youthful power,  'stoicism' always seemed out of place. He used it most often to refer to newfound religions or philosophical approaches that were puritanically moralistic.

Durant's place in all this seems a bit odd: while he approves of progress and prosperity, they reach their height during these epicurean periods which involve a worship of the intellect and the decline of emotionally-charged elements of civilization, particularly religion. He habitually mourns this decay, thinking of religion as a means by which people put their persistent tendency to believe in the supernatural to use -- strengthening individual characters, offering consolation to the suffering, and strengthening society and social order. Thus he tacitly approves of the vibrant religion of those who finish the decadent civilizations off and establish their own, all the while sadly recounting the horrors that the conquerors visit upon the vanquished. (Hinduism is the only religion in his book that doesn't attack the beliefs or artifacts of other civilizations, apparently because it co-copts them. Buddhism doesn't die in India: Hinduism simply absorbs it.)

As I cannot comment intelligently on much of the content (being wholly ignorant of some of his subjects, particularly early India and China), I can only say that I enjoyed reading the work, quirks included, and that I think my understanding of part of the human story improved for having read it. The book's age is somewhat problematic for the reader looking for a work like this: in Durant's world, the "present day" is the early 1930s -- and much has changed since then. Hitler has been the chancellor of Germany for two years and is swiftly turning it into a totalitarian nightmare;  Great Britain is the master of India, and Imperial Japan has annexed both Korea and a northern province of China, operating it as the puppet-state Manchukwo. Durant speculates on whether Japan and the United States will fight over their competing economic interests in the Pacific: he thinks they will, in all likelihood,  for economic competition has driven war throughout human history. Although old scholarship isn't necessarily bad scholarship, in the nearly eighty years since this book first saw publication, archaeological discoveries or linguistic breakthroughs might have added context that makes Durant's summaries inaccurate. An inconsequential example of this is Piltdown Man, which Durant references in tracking prehistorical hominids across Eurasia: Piltdown Man is a hoax, one not exposed until the 1950s.

There are undoubtedly other books and series written in the subject of ancient history or general surveys,  probably some written within the last decade with up-to-date scholarship. Are there better books in this subject? That I can't answer, not having read any series to recommend this book over. As said before, I did enjoy the book and do think myself edified for having read it. Durant's distinguishing characteristic, I imagine, is his decision to give a history that does not discount one thread of human life for another -- instead, he pursues economics, politics, religion, philosophy, drama, literature, and the like all with equal diligence. That approach is why I decided to start reading the series, it is why I will continue in it, and it is why I think the book worth your investigation if the subject is of interest to you.

Related:

• The Story of Civilization on Wikipedia, which contains a detailed table of contents. 
• The Outline of History, H. G. Wells. I have not read it, but it's on my "Eventually" list.

Nehru: the Invention of India

Nehru: the Invention of India
© 2003 Shashi Tharoor
282 pages
 

The movie Gandhi introduced me to many of the key figures in India’s independence movement and early political leadership, and beyond Gandhi no man interested me more than the Mahatma’s right hand, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru. Gandhi’s commitment to nonviolence stemmed from his near-mystic religious beliefs, but Nehru held fast to those convictions without religious training. The close relationship between the two men in light of their differing religious convictions fascinated me, so I decided to read a biography of Nehru,  India’s first prime minister,

Nehru emerges from this book as an iconic figure for Indians: their Thomas Paine, George Washington, and Abraham Lincoln all converge under his mantle. Nehru defined the necessity of independence, participated in the movement, and attempted to steer the ship of state around sectarianism and political subordination to the world’s superpowers. Nehru is in ways more western than eastern: largely nonreligious, educated in England, and valuing western political theory more than eastern religious principles. Interestingly, he and Gandhi come to the same conclusions from different approaches on various subjects.  For instance, Gandhi believes in self-sufficiency as a spiritual value while Nehru sees it as a Marxist necessity: without economic independence Indians are doomed to political bondage of one form or another.

Tharoor presents an easily digestible narrative here that is sympathetic but not protective of Nehru. Tharoor clearly admires him for his pragmatic idealism, integrity, and internationalism, but sees Nehru’s political leadership as flawed, particularly in the realm of economics and foreign affairs. The ending chapter – following Nehru’s death – attempts to summarize Nehru’s influence on the stated he helped create and dominated for so long. Regardless of Nehru’s administrative shortcomings, he is for me as interesting a politician as I’ve never encountered. He reminds me of Marcus Aurelius: thrust into the spotlight unwillingly, wary of the power he possesses, daunted by the responsibility, and yet determined to make his character prove worthy of the challenge. Most remarkable for me was the way he checked himself: at a time when no one would criticize him, he wrote to a newspapers anonymously warning that “Nehru has all the makings of a dictator in him”.