gavin's blog

The 10 Best Books of 2005 is a list released by the New York Times.

Books vs. Movies is an interesting head to head of a half dozen movie adaptations of books at Time Magazine.

Time Magazine also has published Top 100 lists of the best movies and the best books of the twentieth century (something like that).

[Some Indian movies and books in the lists, check them out. I've seen only about 20 of the movies and read about.....hmmm.....aah......six of the books (Gone with the Wind, 1984, Animal Farm, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Catcher in the Rye, Catch 22). Okay, so I'm a philistine.]

Interesting article about a new book on Yiddish expressions. It reminded me of an Oprah book club discussion of John Steinbeck's East of Eden in which the word timshel was discussed as one of the most important expressions of all, because in its meaning 'thou mayest' it affirmed strongly the nature of Free Will.

From East of Eden: ' “Don’t you see?” he cried. “The American Standard translation orders men to triumph over sin, and you can call sin ignorance. The King James translation makes a promise in ‘Thou shalt,’ meaning that men will surely triumph over sin. But the Hebrew word, the word timshel—‘Thou mayest’—that gives a choice. It might be the most important word in the world. That says the way is open. That throws it right back on a man. For if ‘Thou mayest’—it is also true that ‘Thou mayest not.’ Don’t you see?” '

From the article:

'The very popular phrase "Hak mir nisht ken tshaynik" literally means "Don't knock me a teakettle." Figuratively, as Mr. Wex translates it, it means "you don't have to shut up completely, but I'd really appreciate it if you'd stop rattling on about the same damned thing all the time.".............

Yiddish is the language par excellence of complaint. How could it be otherwise? It took root among Jews scattered across Western Europe during the Middle Ages and evolved over centuries of persecution and transience. It is, Mr. Wex writes, "the national language of nowhere," the medium of expression for a people without a home..........

Yiddish excels at the fine art of the insult and the curse, or klole, which Mr. Wex, in a chapter titled "You Should Grow Like an Onion," calls "the kvetch-militant." Americans generally stick to short, efficient four-letter words when doling out abuse. Yiddish has lots of those, too, and it abounds in terse put-downs like "shtik fleysh mit oygn." Applied to a stupid person, it means "a piece of meat with eyes.".....................

A simple, American-style "drop dead" might be rendered as "a dismal animal death on you" ("a viste pgire af dir")...........

Yiddish is the language par excellence of complaint. How could it be otherwise?' '

I often think the ancientness of Jewish culture is evident in the superiority of various aspects of it. And timshel definitely made me think (but that's more to do with Steinbeck's art of perception & expression). I wanna check out Born to Kvetch!

entitled 'Daughter of the Killing Fields' was the subject of Hard Talk on BBC today (one of my favorite TV programs). Such an articulate and sensitive woman who had such a horrifying childhood, has now added her voice to the growing memoir literature about human atrocity in the 20th century.

May our collective witnessing purge us of the beast within.

The Tipping Point is one of the best books I've ever read, and I've read quite a few (several hundred actually, but that's what Ken Wilber reads in a few months :-) ). In it Malcolm Gladwell describes the process by which such varied phenomena as hush puppies, drop in crime, suicides and smoking become social epidemics, how certain phenomena spread from person to person rapidly within a specific (which may extend to national or even global) population. What is so great about this book is that he isolates three specific factors that explain how this happens and therefore how it can be made to happen - knowledge that can be used commercially to pitch brands and marketing as well as socially to create schemes. You can read a nice description that captures its main ideas (first part of the page till Conclusions), but remember, that is no substitute for one of the most entertaining and intellectually satisfying books ever written.

The first of the three factors is stickiness - which means that the thing that will spread must be sticky in the first place, it must stick in the mind, so that it can spread fast. remember the Thanda matlab Coca Cola tagline tied to the Paanch campaign? Now that is a classic example of stickiness.

Why I'm talking about this right now is because I wanted to share a phenomenal example of stickiness - the new Tata Indicom cellular plan which is called 0123 (or is it 123?) - 0 for own network, 1 for other networks, 2 for landlines and 3 for std. The entire range of subscription plans which used to be confusing because each network had different rates for each has been collapsed by Tata Indicom into one word 0123. Now that is very sticky.

Just wanted to share this.

The day before yesterday I put up a couple of posts on philosophy. And today this post on management. Recently, I've gotten feedback that these sides of me are missing on the blog. So, here we are!

was an interesting read.......though not anywhere in the class of the awesome Tipping Point. If you like knowing how things work and why, enjoy intriguing questions that have non-intuitive answers, are a sucker for a good story (served with several small ones on the side), and generally have an appetite for the hidden order behind the surface of all things, then Freakonomics should be on your reading list.

The Tipping Point is the lodestone of books in this genre, and Freakonomics takes on its central example - that crime in New York dropped by more than half because of minor changes in law enforcement that had an impact way out of proportion to them - with a vengeance. It argues that not only is this wrong, the real reason is even stranger and much more interesting.

Ultimately both these books are about this - the strangeness of a reality that defies assumption yet yields to careful examination - and often in hugely entertaining and enlightening ways.

Freakonomics takes this passion for the strange fully frontally, and eschewing a hanging theme, embraces the seemingly absurd wholeheartedly. It is however not simply a collection of the weird, it is an in depth examination by one of the leading and celebrated economists of our time.

Just finished lunch after visiting the Strand Bookstall sale at Juhu in the morning. This annual sale usually held at Sunderbhai Hall, Churchgate (Mumbai), may now become a more frequent affair it seems, with the addition of suburban venues to further Mr Shanbhag’s (its proprietor) mission of making reading and books as accessible as possible. Every single book, even the very newest ones, (many not even available on Amazon.com – in Jan I bought Malcolm Gladwell's Blink in paperback when the hardback had just gone on sale at Amazon.com and was still filling backorders. Also Roger Penrose’s The Road to Reality was ‘on sale’ when it was on pre-order at Amazon.com – go figure) are marked down by 40%. Older books, in pristine salivation-inducing international editions are available at Rs.365/- or Rs.410/- and even superb coffee table books are available for a couple of hundred bucks more. The collection is fantastic, the prices unbelievable, the service par excellence – what more could a bibliophile ask for? I limited myself to four – Samuel Huntington’s Who are we? (a follow-up to his seminal Clash of Civilizations), Rupert Sheldrake’s The Sense of Being Stared At (in which the master theorist whose concept of morphogenetic fields is now widely accepted, tries to explain the unexplicable 'paranormal'), Stuart Kauffman’s Investigations (subtitled A bold exploration into the very essence of life itself’, this is a book by one of the leading scientists and theorists of our time, a winner of the MacArthur ‘Genius’ award to boot) and Shashi Tharoor’s India: From Midnight to the Millenium (one of the seminal commentaries on post-independence Indian Identity as it is and as it has come to be). And I paid fewer than Rs.700/- for the lot. Amazing! The books I gave a pass to - for various reasons, chiefly but not limited to the financial :-) - are even better than these: Seth Godin’s All Marketer’s are Liars, Pico Iyer’s The Global Soul, Robert Wright’s Non-Zero, Shashi Tharoor's Biograhy of Nehru, Harivanshrai Bacchan's Autobiography, Penguin's 2005 omnibus of New Indian Writings and Daniel Boorstein’s two masterpieces – The Discoverers and The Creators. And terrific fiction by Milan Kundera, Hari Kunzru, Naguib Mahfouz; poetry by Rilke, Frost; screenwriting tomes by William Goldman, all going for peanuts. The sale is on for another week, so if you are in Mumbai, and don’t visit it, do not ever say you love books!