Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy – John Le Carre

John Le Carre was a name I had heard often. In quizzes, in articles, and occasionally mentioned by a friend or two, specifically those who loved to read spy thrillers. And almost always I had heard in the context of a story called Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. It had also surfaced a few years ago when the Gary Oldman movie of the same name had released with much acclaim. I had almost watched it then but somehow checked myself to fall in line with the habit of, as much as I could control it, always reading the text first. 

So it was no surprise when, after the death and subsequent eulogies of John Le Carre in the press, I used it as an excuse to go to my local book-store and buy a copy. Given that I am a sucker for good thriller novels and had always heard about the story in extremely positive overtones, I had great expectations from it. And the book more than met them.

RETHINC – T.T. Ram Mohan

I have always been a fan of Prof. T.T. Ram Mohan’s crisp and clear communication, whether it was him teaching economics back in college, his lucid and insightful op-eds in newspapers, his chronicle of institution building in Brick by Red Brick and now, his take on the broken system of corporate governance and the cult of the CEO in RETHINC.

The book broadly covers themes of the undemocratic nature of modern-day institutions, centralization of authority, bloated CEO-pay, conflict of interest in the CEO-Board / dominant investor-Board relationship, and corporate governance. Prof. Ram Mohan, himself having served on the board of several institutions draws richly from his experience. The perspectives from academia peppered with case examples from the practical world make for interesting reading. The book is also replete with extensive quotes from Peter Drucker, Warren Buffet, Thomas Piketty, Joseph Stiglitz, among others, which are enjoyable and add depth to the arguments.

RETHINC packs a lot and Prof. Ram Mohan, in his characteristic style, does not mince words. The only thing I wish was better is that the book does entail some repetition and occasionally ventures into technicalities that may be slightly difficult for a layman to grasp. Other than that, it makes up for an interesting learning experience and helps bring to light aspects of corporations that we would ordinarily miss.

Reclaiming the Present

“We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infinitesimal hairline between an all-powerfully causative past and an absorbingly important future. We have no present. Our consciousness is almost completely preoccupied with memory and expectation. We do not realize that there never was, is, nor will be any other experience than present experience. We are therefore out of touch with reality.”
– Alan Watts

I often think about this paragraph, and now, confined to the balcony of my house in the middle of an unending pandemic, I find myself brooding over Watts’ wise words now and then. Several of my friends and family have called me up saying that they are feeling a growing discomfort with this idleness, with this lack of movement and with this sudden paucity of things to look forward to. They express a deep disappointment in the lack of variety in the news which is “overwhelmingly about the pandemic”. Often, they gloat about the money they have lost with the crash of the stock market or the trip that they should have made in February that may no longer see the light of the day for a foreseeable future. Some of them are worried about how their jobs will turn out in a post COVID world, and rightly so, while others worry about internships and jobs that never materialized the way they had hoped because of how this unexpected visitor took us by a storm ravaging worlds and economies alike. 

Live a Little – Howard Jacobson

Every year when I travel all the way to Jaipur for the Literature Festival, I travel with no expectations but one – by some stroke of perchance or serendipity – to discover a new author. And, in the process of that discovery, if my past experience was to bear any witness, you not only come back with a new name, you also inherit a new person, a new idea, a new way of looking at the world. I can’t thank the festival enough for introducing me to Jhumpa Lahiri, Andre Aciman, and now, Howard Jacobson.

Howard Jacobson took my fancy when he was a part of a larger panel on fiction (as told by my friends) and later on travel (which I personally bore witness to). Every time the mic was handed over to him, he was very funny, or very deep and, more often than not, both. Off I rushed to the book stall and to my dismay, neither ended up finding his Booker prize winning work ‘The Finkler Question’ nor the 2014 shortlist ‘J’ there. Apparently, everything had been sold out the previous day. As a drifted across the book stall, heartbroken, I chanced upon a slightly torn copy of his latest book – ‘Live a Little’ on a random aisle. With a cover like that and the lovely premise, my joy knew no bounds.

Live a Little is a story of two individuals falling in love in the absolute twilight of their lives. Beryl Dusinberry is 99, Shimi Carmelli is 91. And yet, here they are on Finchley Road, falling in love, slowly, but surely. To be honest, I didn’t enjoy the book so much when I started with it. Jacobson’s language initially reminded me of Joseph Conrad in its complexity and vocabulary, in that I had to look at the thesaurus often which broke my chain of thought. But once you are drawn into the story, it makes for a wonderful reading.

I found Shimi’s character much more layered and interesting, and Jacobson’s writing does carry that wit, if only in a darkly comic way. Sometimes you would chuckle to yourself, and often you would be moved. I can’t quite say I could feel for Shimi or Beryl, or completely connect to them, but the way Jacobson builds his characters, there was definitely this neutral space in which I felt I knew them closely.

My only grouse with the story is that it builds up slowly and then moves too fast. I just couldn’t help but compare it to ‘A Man Called Ove’ (due to the similarity of premise), and anything, when compared to A Man Called Ove is bound to end up falling short of your expectations at some level of the other.

To be fair, Howard Jacobson as an author grows on you. I wasn’t quite sure of him when I started, but by the time I finished this book, I fell in love with his writing. I think Live a Little shows the promise of his writing that may have once blossomed in A Finkler Question or J. That being said Live a Little shines in its own light in reminding us that love finds a way if we are open enough to embrace it, irrespective who or where we are.

On Swimming & Childhood Heroes

A couple of weeks back, I came down with a severe debilitating back pain. It was just that I woke up one morning and realized I could no longer sit on a chair anymore. My innately self-destructive tendency to undermine my illnesses, and the serious nature of what had hit me this time meant that I was in for a long haul. Since allopathic medicines were failing to provide me with any respite, the doctor suggested several lifestyle changes. One of these were that I was required to start swimming on a regular basis. Again.