We have read books that cause hairs stand on end, we have read books where reading the book seems like an act of sheer thrill and excitement. We have also read books where the protagonist's life story causes the reader to look at the sky and wonder 'now, this fella is onto something'. Now what happens when you read a book that makes hairs stand on end, cloud thoughts with awe and respect for the protagonist, and more importantly, what happens when all of the above are done for the good of human kind and human civilization.
Well, to know that, you have to read 'When Google Met Wikileaks' by Julian Assange. He could be the smartest person on earth. Yes, there are many contenders, but he very well, could be 'The smartest'. This book shows why.
Now, let's play a game. Suppose, you stay at Egypt. The year is 2011. Your government is run by Hosni Mubarak. For all the right reasons, your population has come to the streets to protest. Government and military are hounding the rebels, incriminating them, killing them, persecuting them. So what do you do? You take a step back, take a deep breath, talk to your fellow rebels and friends, make a plan and execute the plan. But you cannot go out in fear of persecution. Then how would you talk and know the situation and plan the plan? Simple. You talk to them over phone or SMS or Internet. But, Mubarak is bad. Government has cut off the phone lines, cut off the Internet, they have almost obliterated those services. And even if you talk, nobody except your partners should know that you are talking. How do you talk?
Assange made a prototype, a small, UDP encrypted, peer to peer (P2P), flood network. Just like a flood which takes all possible paths in its way, a flood network reaches all of the hosts (computers or mobiles) in a network. UDP is a protocol used in network communications, TCP being another. But UDP is very small and therefore, you can send connections to a very large number of hosts, in a very short time span. But like in Egypt, the connected hosts are not talking to each other (when you read this review in Goodreads, you are reading from your local system and this review is somewhere else, therefore somewhere the hosts are talking so that you can read) and therefore you need a way for the computers to talk for the people to talk. With this flood network, you can do 'hole punching' (tricking the firewall or blocking software) and let the computers talk. So it doesn't need any big network or tons of computers. You get a phone and do this. You teach others to do this.
In Egypt and in Turkey and in countries during Arab Spring, this happened. This is not fiction. Technology caught the Kenyan dictatorship and overturned it. Wikileaks and Assange played a crucial, very crucial role in Tunisian politics and elections. Assange brought US and Pentagon to its knees. It brought the misdeeds of UK and GCHQ in open daylight. It showed the collateral murder, Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib prisons, fictitous stories of Iraq war. It showed how the indigenous people in Africa are being trampled by western corporations. It showed how governments, state actors, businesses subvert everything. They kill (Aaron Swartz), torture (Chelsea Manning), persecute (Jake Appelbaum), financially weaken (Assange) adversaries. Yet, Arab Spring happened. Yet, Occupy Wall Street happened. Yet, Tunisian election happened. And lastly, Edward Snowden happened.
So apart from Assange's prototype, what did the rebels do in Egypt? THey hacked Toyota in Cairo, took over their satellite uplink and used it to connect to an ISP called Noor Group - who famously didn't give in to Mubarak - and ran their own DNS servers to get out of Egypt and provided communications inside Egypt. All of these things happened inside a war-torn, poverty-stricken, African nation with no help from anyone.
Do we call this success? If yes, then human civilization and progress and humanity need these successes.
Does Google help here? No. Does Facebook help here? No. Does Amazon help? Does Microsoft help? No and no and no and no and no. Twitter atleast tried to help, willingly or unwillingly. So who helped? Seemingly the cesspools of Internet helped. Sites like 4chan and reddit helped. Sites like wikileaks helped.
If so, then why, Eric Schimdt gets to lecture us on human civilization and ways to take it forward? Why not Assange? Why not Snowden? After all, this video was brought out by wikileaks -
But technology aside, this book is also a revolutionary document with respect to the journalistic principles advocated by Assange. He argues that misinformation spreads rapidly and since miscreants are often incentivized to spread misinformation, the risks are higher. As Thomas Jefferson had said,
“The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.”
Therefore, Assange argues for scientific journalism. Like in peer reviewed scientific publications, the no of citations lend an aura of scrupulousness to an argument, every news report, should also come with the original citations and clearly mention the sources where they can be obtained. Then a reader can go and read the sources and corroborate and finally decide for herself. It will be contradictory to the the modern day Goebbels.
Assange argues that historically wars, most of the wars, happened due to lies. So one might come up and say, 'That's really bad to know that wars happen due to lies'. However, doesn't this argument also say 'From another perspective, if we practice truth, we will not have wars.' And we can practice truth only in a just society. In this context, the definition of a just society is not limited to crime and punishment or egalitarianism, but it covers processes, frameworks and regulatory mechanisms of state as well.
We can think of something absolutely trivial. Say, taxation. I will take example from my own country. If I go out for a dinner, I pay service tax, which is levied on the bill. The rate of service tax is 14.50%. But, service tax is taxed on 40% of the bill, not the total bill. On top of that, Value Added Tax or VAT is an entity specific to each state of the union. The calculation turns interesting when alcoholic beverages are considered. They are taxed at 20% of the amount paid to buy them. So if I drink a glass of scotch and eat a stake, and my bill is X rupees, then the tax on food is ((x-y)/0.4)*14.50 and tax on alcohol is y*0.2 and VAT is (whatever_percentage * x). We assume y to be the bill of alcohol. There is another fascinating thing called service charge, which is restaurant specific. And then again, service tax can only be taxed in AC dining restaurants.
You see the entire taxation structure on a simple dining bill is uselessly and inexplicably complicated. But does it really need to? Why bureaucratic processes are laced with so many intertwined layers of complexity that to an ordinary citizen, it may look like an wild abstraction? In countless pieces of legislation, we see repetition of this. The logic is simple. If information can be buried under locks, then to open them, we need keys and if those keys aren't easy to obtain, then investment on the keys wouldn't be economically viable and hence, cannot be replicated at scale.
This book is entirely conversational and the CEO and executive chairman of Internet behemoth Google, looks like an insignificant entity, who I hope and wish, will be remembered only in the footnotes of humanity, if at all. The future is on us. Shall we protect and proceed with the legacy of Assange or shall we move with the Zuckerbergs and Schimdts. Only time will tell. ...more
Mother nature, can unfurl her succulent beauty in the most glorious forms and amaze our eyes. On and the next instant, she can also devour her own ownMother nature, can unfurl her succulent beauty in the most glorious forms and amaze our eyes. On and the next instant, she can also devour her own own child without batting an eyelash. It is this nature, that Jules Verne described and oh boy, what a magnificent description it was that it has sustained and nurtured a readership since the year of 1870. His imagination was prescient and his craft of shaping, moulding that imagination into words was of such quality - that even in our age of scientific achievements - those words continue to set readers' pulses racing; like the great ship Nautilus of Captain Nemo raced through all the oceans of the world.
Alas, imagination is what I lack and this thought kept rebounding in my mind as I read the adventures of Professor Arronax, his servant Conseil, harpooner Ned Land and the captain and crews of Nautilus. The word selection of 'Nautilus' was prophetic - biologically the organism which it indicates is classified as a 'living fossil' and etymologically it means 'Sailor'. This profound theme of ancient past and inquisitive mind is all that I need and this book, heartily provided me enough doses of both of them.
Imagination, curiosity and knowledge will perhaps set all of us free, ready to embrace whatever awaits us, just like it did for Captain Nemo. And thus we shall all move in a moving thing and we will change through changing, just as all protagonists did in this book.
Mobilis in mobili.
Thank you Mr. Verne for writing, more importantly thinking and most importantly imagining. ...more
We, human beings, are the masters of reason. Whatever is within our realm of reason or comprehension is considered right and what cannot be reasoned, We, human beings, are the masters of reason. Whatever is within our realm of reason or comprehension is considered right and what cannot be reasoned, becomes wrong. Individuals of course can disseminate according to their own reason but generically, the fulcrum of judgment balances within the two ends of reasonable and unreasonable opinion. Apropos to this, we can consider the logic of reason to be either 1 or 0 making it a binary system. Either something is right or wrong.
Now if we extend the earlier logic into a very specific discussion about 'mental illness', the binary system becomes more ambitious and omnipresent. Anyone with mental illness, in today's society as well, is considered as an outcast. Society judges mentally sick persons as someone who cannot reason properly, who fails to fathom the usual, monolithic discourse of everyday life and in virtue of not being able to do so, carries a stigma of social alienation. This makes the individual in question more awkward to the others who don't have the 'mental illness'. Semantically speaking - this can be aptly described by what sociologist Ervine Goffman noted in his essay 'Asylums' - this is institutionalization of people based on a certain trait. To expand on this, a group of persons, from different social strata having myriad differences, are hoarded into the same ward of the institution of curing mental illness, where the notion about oneself is intractable and where different backgrounds of life are all blended in an uniform, insipid tranquility of ward discipline. Disfigurement of the difference is also viable outside of the mental institution as well, because it allows the patients to conform to a preset rule and regulation that the society has already predisposed on them.
Scanlon. one of the patients in 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest' says, "Hell of a life. Damned if you do and damned if you don't. Puts a man in one confounded bind, I'd say." This novel talks about institutionalization, forcefully being coerced into the inmates of the ward, under the disguise of the term 'Therapeutic value'.
'One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest', one of the seminal works of fiction concerning insanity and individuals and rebellion against institutionalized repression, gives us a pick into the ward of the 'Big Nurse', Miss Ratched, who runs the ward with her needle precision accuracy and harmony and doesn't allow a single fleck of dust to go in the direction of nonconformity. It throws us into the daily monochromatic life of the psychiatric patients in the ward and the military regime they are bound to follow, day in and day out, year in and year out. That dull, colorless ward life is also bifurcated into two categories, 'Acutes' the mentally unstable lot but are expected to go out and blend with society someday and 'Chronics' who have been deemed as insane for their life time. Chief Bromden, narrator of the story, tells
"What the Chronics are - or most of us - are machines with flaws inside that can't be repaired, flaws born in, or flaws beat in over so many years of the guy running head on into solid things that by the time the hospital found him he was bleeding rust in some vacant lot."
Within that minuscule ward itself, the fear manufactured by the institution is overwhelming and that fear prevents the acutes from mingling with the chronics. Whatever puny reason the patients themselves mentioned, Chief Bromden says, that is not true and the actual reason is
'... keeps them away from the chronic side so much that they don't like to be reminded that here's what could happen to them someday. The Big Nurse recognizes this fear and knows how to put it to use, she'll point out to an acute, whenever he goes into a sulk, that you boys be good boys and cooperate with the staff policy which is engineered for your cure, or you'll end up over on that side.'
One day a new patient, Randle Patrick McMurphy, 'redheaded with long red sideburns and a tangle of curls from under his cap' enters into the ward with his devilish grin and brass loving swagger. He proclaims that he is a gambling fool and one hell of a trickster and he intends to bring some fun into the ward. Other patients couldn't understand his assertive nature and in the day's meeting with the Big Nurse, they got to know that McMurphy is an army veteran with dishonorable discharge and borderline psychopath with violent sexual tendencies. He even has a statutory charge of rape but he insists that he is not a convict. Patients and staff alike, don't know how to deal with him. He is open about his sexual leviathan and capitalist attitude involving poker and gambling. From the onset itself, the reader gets a notion that McMurphy isn't a hero, isn't a savior. He is a human being with flaws and merits. Kesey never wanted to make McMurphy an idol, he is just a nomadic, hard-working character with the smells of 'work and sweat and farms' unlike the 'germicide, piss and old man manure, zinc ointment' smell of the hospital. What Kesey does best here is that McMurphy, despite of being the protagonist, isn't the narrator of the story. The story is told from the perspective of the half Indian, half Colombian, Chief Bromden. Therefore the reader gets an accurate view of the entire ward and patients.
McMurphy's introduction brings some unprecedented waves into the ward. Bromden notices that the Big Nurse, who used to run the ward with her cold, unshakable professionalism- who is just a paw of the larger society who defames the mentally unstable - faces few problems of her own. Earlier we got to know that the Big Nurse, Miss Ratched, is someone who uses her powers of manipulation and calculative coercion and insidious insinuation to run the ward like it's a well-oiled locomotive engine. Bromden notices that behind her plastic smile demeanor, there is a hideous motive. A motive which is not her own exclusive vendetta but she is also a mere instrument of the larger society outside of the institution who have stigmatized and categorized the mentally sicks into a same group of larva being hatched in unison and have treated and condemned them in the psychiatric ward to rot into the dehumanized, homogenized culture, turning them into a 'functioning, well adjusted component of the society'. The patients when they go out of the ward do not go out as cured individuals but rather a repaired, glossy end product of the institution. In Bromden's narrative, the ward is a 'factory of the combine' and the combine is itself the society, the large nebulous sphere of social, economic context which is a construct of the binary social order of America in 1950. McMurphy brings disruption into this greased, oiled cog of the combine, laughing hysterically, cracking jokes on everybody, overturning Nurse Ratched's disciplines into a hilarious set of symbolism of domination. McMurphy isn't an intellectual but his work-farm experience tells him that the ward policy of democratic meeting among the patients and ward staffs isn't sanctimonious.In first group meeting,McMurphy notices how Harding (another patient) is torn apart by fellow inmates at the mere insinuation of Nurse Ratched. Harding, on a fine day, slipped his tongue into telling how he is insecure of his wife and when the topic gets its place in the meeting table, everyone pounds on Harding like salivating hounds, blaming him for his insecurity. Nurse Ratched insists that this meeting is of therapeutic value as it brings democratic behavior, openness into a 'made to scale prototype of the larger society outside'. But deep down inside, all the patients know that isn't true. However none of them expresses what McMurphy expressed. One of the great texts from the novel is the argument and counter argument of Harding and McMurphy after that group meeting.
Harding says, "This world ... belongs to the strong, my friend! The ritual of our existence is based on the strong getting stronger by devouring the weak. We must face up to this. No more than right that it should be this way. We must learn to accept it as a law of the natural world. The rabbits accept their role in the ritual and recognize the wolf as the strong. In defense, the rabbit becomes sly and frightened and elusive and he digs holes and hides when the wolf is about. And he endures, he goes on. He knows his place. He most certainly doesn't challenge the wolf to combat. Now, would that be wise? Would it?" ...
McMurphy, in his brass, loud voice dismisses Harding's rabbit theory and explains the group meeting tactic of Nurse Ratched using the analogy of a chicken pecking party.
"The flock gets sight of a spot of blood on some chicken and they all go to peckin' at it, see, till they rip the chicken to shreds, blood and bones and feathers. But usually a couple of the flock gets spotted in the fracas, then it's their turn. And a few more gets spots and gets pecked to death, and more and more. Oh, a peckin' party can wipe out the whole flock in a matter of a few hours, buddy, I seen it. A mighty awesome sight. The only way to prevent it—with chickens—is to clip blinders on them. So's they can't see."
Harding retorts, "Mr. McMurphy ... my friend ... I'm not a chicken, I'm a rabbit. The doctor is a rabbit. Cheswick there is a rabbit. Billy Bibbit is a rabbit. All of us in here are rabbits of varying ages and degrees, hippity-hopping through our Walt Disney world. Oh, don't misunderstand me, we're not in here because we are rabbits-we'd be rabbits wherever we were-we're all in here because we can't adjust to our rabbithood. We need a good strong wolf like the nurse to teach us our place."
McMurphy argues, "Right at your balls. No, that nurse isn't some kind of monster chicken, buddy, what she is is a ball-cutter. I've seen a thousand of them, old and young, men and women. Seen 'em all over the country and in the homes - people who try to make you weak so they can get you to toe the line, to follow their rules, to live like they want you to...You even been kneed in the nuts in a brawl buddy? Stops you cold, don't it...If you're up against a guy who wants to win by making you weaker instead of making himself stronger, then watch for his knee, he's gonna go for your vitals. And that's what the old buzzard is doing, going for your vitals. ... The hell with that; she's a bitch and a buzzard and a ball-cutter, and don't kid me, you know what I am talking about."
It is in this way that the patients of the ward expect their salvation in McMurphy. McMurphy isn't a toned down version of the superimposed righteous morality of the society, the combine. He runs his life in his own free whim and gets trapped into the binary social system. However the patients, except Chief Bromden, forgets that McMurphy is also a trickster and as the classic trickster, McMurphy falls into his own trick. The end of the novel is a shocking, gritty affair which disintegrates Nurse Ratched's tyrannical ward into a series of tragedies. Perhaps Kesey wanted to point out that fighting against the society isn't all heroic as it seems. It has its own failures, personal sacrifices, sometimes an ultimate sacrifice like what was thrust upon McMurphy. McMurphy didn't choose the sacrifice but the inmates whom he motivated and tricked and gambled into fools and also made them laugh, selected the choice of sacrifice for McMurphy. Because McMurphy shouldn't be a toned down vegetable, gawking numbly at the ward policies where he could have thrown them and ridiculed them and overturned them. McMurphy is a symbol, a demagogue of its own kind, who denigrated the stagnant ward, took the poisonous venom of the combine onto himself thinking all he is doing is a trick to put the combine in its wrong foot in its own backyard.
In this way this novel is much more about insanity and individuals. It is much more contextual than psychiatric ward and psychiatric merits. It is about the place of an individual who refuses to play as society expects him to play. And all that is brought in the claustrophobic environment of the ward, 'the made to scale prototype of the bigger society'.
Ken Kesey volunteered in a government sanctioned drug experiments and worked in graveyard shift of Menlo Park Veteran's Hospital where he spent time with the patients. He was not particularly fond of the hallucinogenic drugs, mind-altering substances that were prescribed to the patients nor did he think that the patients are mentally insane. He thought that they don't fit into the discolored, conventional set of rules and hierarchy that the society threw them into. He noticed that the ward staff and patients are two completely separate entities, often hostile to each other. There is an environment of enmity about the patients where all are labeled and treated like a single entity, killing any room of self improvement and differentiation. It is the same as what Goffman observed in his book 'Asylums', that taking a mentally ill person out of his or her life context, hospitalizing them in a psychiatric institution and then sending back to the same life context is analogous to taking a drowning person out of water, teaching him how to ride bicycle and then putting him to the waters again to drown. And the cycle keeps on rinsing and repeating itself. The patients when hospitalized feel that the society has condoned them into their debilitating condition, feeling that their in-ward time is a wasted life. The patients themselves were being treated in an impassive, rigid manner like a steel barricade, allowing no wind of humanity to enter or go out. It is a prosaic condition of institutionalizing them to a archaic set of rules and drugs.
This novel, however important, has one serious flaw. And as I read through it and I read twice to be sure of that, I felt that it has an undercurrent of misogyny. The women characters in the novel - and there are not much characters in the novel itself except the ward inmates and therefore this assumption of mine, might be contradictory in itself - are into two categories. One is ball-cutter buzzard depicted by Nurse Ratched and the other is whore, depicted by Candy. Now the scope of the novel and its theme don't need many characters in the first place. It all happens within four walls of a psychiatric ward. But still the exuberance McMurphy exuded is a dominant alpha male masculinity. The central female character, Nurse Ratched, is a puritanical sexless character, an evil mother like authority whose sole intention is to keep her little boys i.e. the patients under her mechanical surveillance and autocracy. However she isn't the central character of the tyranny that the inmates are exposed to, she is, as Bromden observes 'it's not the Big Nurse by herself, but it's the whole combine, the nation wide combine that's the really big force and the nurse is just a high ranking official for them.'
But the social critique of the novel, alluded into the psychiatric ward context is an overblown celebration of male sexuality and power. Kesey put the confrontation of the patients and the staff as a struggle between male and female genders. As Harding says 'we are victims of a matriarchy' describing that the Big Nurse is protected by her friend, another military veteran lady who holds managerial position of the ward. Harding observes that despite of themselves being the rabbit, they are a kind of its own, 'most of us lack the sexual ability to make the grade as adequate rabbits. Failures we are, feeble, stunted, weak little creatures in a weak, little race. Rabbits, sans whambam, a pathetic notion.' It is in this context that the sexless puritanism of the Big Nurse is more pronounced. She denies her essential femininity to gain order over others. As Bromden observes, 'Her face is precision made, like an expensive baby doll, skin like flesh colored enamel, blend of white and cream and baby-blue eyes, small nose, pink little nostrils - everything working together except the color of her lips and fingernails, and the size of her bosom. A mistake was somehow made in manufacturing, putting those big, womanly breasts on what would otherwise been a perfect work and you can see how bitter she is about it.'
McMurphy appears like a kind of sexual savior in the ward opposed to the Big Nurse's ability to suck up any sexual innuendo and render the men with the notion of helpless, hapless creature. Darwinian theory of survival is a prevailing note through out the novel as Harding said about the strong devouring the weak. In the context of sexuality, all the men of the ward consider McMurphy as the predator and insinuate him to use his manly power against the Big Nurse. In the conversation between Harding and McMurphy, it is more pronounced that the sexual vigor of our protagonist is considered as an weapon against Big Nurse.
'... man has one but truly effective weapon against the juggernaut of modern matriarchy, but it certainly is not laughter. One weapon and with every passing year in this hip, motivationally researched society, more and more people are discovering how to render that weapon useless and conquer those who have hitherto been the conquerors... and do you think for all your proclaimed psychopathic powers, that you could effectively use your weapon against our champion? Do you ever think you could use it against Miss Ratched, McMurphy? Ever?' They talk about the Big Nurse's sexless appearance and her apparent lack of sensuality but Harding keeps putting, 'Still - for the sake of argument, could you get it up over her even if she wasn't old, even if she was young and had the beauty of Helen?' McMurphy concedes that he couldn't but soon he realizes that this conceding act eviscerates himself of his brazen mischievous attitude and downright puts him into defeat and he vows back, 'I've never seen a woman I thought more man than me'. This marked differentiation of the women as the 'wolf who castrates the rabbit' takes the credit of social critique of Kesey's work. The male dominance is clearly shown in the form of drinking, cigarette sharing, gambling and bonding against the Big Nurse.
But Kesey has shown that McMurphy isn't only about sexual proclivity and male bonding. He also has some thoughts inside him. When Scanlon argues that he is 'Just the stud to handle the job', McMurphy admits that he might be but Big Nurse - as all the other inmates are proclaiming isn't the only evil force - is not the sole problem. The problem is much deeper than her, she is just a cog to keep the dominant social ideology of the combine into force and that taking down her or crashing her piety of sexless demeanor isn't going to help anyone. However when the Big Nurse plays another ploy of her insinuating manipulation at the end of the book, McMurphy turns into a violent beast and engages into an assault with her. As Chief Bromden muses, '...only then did he show any sign that he might be anything other than a sane, willful, dogged man performing a hard duty that finally just had to be done, like it or not.'
This assault can be considered either as a masculine assault or a humane assault. I would like to think of the latter but the undercurrent of the novel makes it more like the first one. I however, am not the most qualified reader to judge the book based on gender issues, and therefore although it certainly looks misogynistic in the portrayal of women here, which might very well be intentional by Kesey or unintentional accessory to bring the social oppression out, I will close this personal rambling thinking that this is an ode against society's oppression and society's fixed set of dispositions. As McMurphy notices, 'You guys are not crazy like crazy, rather hung-up.'
EDIT - On another thought, definitely misogynistic. Some other comments of McMurphy also point the same. Not so great anymore, then....more
As I write this, my fingers are touching the laptop keyboard placed in a wooden table on a marble floor balanced in concrete beams inserted deep into As I write this, my fingers are touching the laptop keyboard placed in a wooden table on a marble floor balanced in concrete beams inserted deep into the wet soil of earth, which in turn is part of one or multiple tectonic plates constituting what we merely perceive as earth which, inevitably is a sausage-shaped object, orbiting some star made of hydrogen and helium atoms in an unimaginable conundrum known as milky way galaxy, which supposedly someone has claimed to originate from hydrogen atoms, thereby forming deuterium giving way to helium.
Therefore according to atomic theory, the shape and size of the object otherwise known as Soham is nothing but some combination of atoms. Careful elctro-spectral-neucleosynthesis studies have claimed that the object, in course of writing this blasphemous bullshit, has melted into binary 1 and 0 of TCP-IP protocol, traversing over coaxial cables creating a gigantic ethernet network. Studies are still ongoing about the relative proportion of 1 and 0 and hydrogen atoms in this object, which will be published in the latest de selby research paper of synthetic-degradation-regeneration theory.
Several critics of the last theory have objected that - 'This is almost an insoluble pancake.'...more
If I ever have a child, I will give this book before any other book.
This is something that each and every single individual in the universe should reaIf I ever have a child, I will give this book before any other book.
This is something that each and every single individual in the universe should read. Everybody. Small kids to young children, adolescent youth to mature boys and girls. This.is.a.must.read. Yes, nothing betters it. This book is an absolute-timeless-classic-beauty. ...more
I have come to the usual conclusion that Oscar Wilde is a genius and human kind wasn't worthy of having such a man when he was present. So far I read I have come to the usual conclusion that Oscar Wilde is a genius and human kind wasn't worthy of having such a man when he was present. So far I read three of his plays - The Importance being Earnest, Salome and now Lady Windermere's Fan. And I must say that to me, this is the best of the three.
The theme is mundane. I don't know how many times a book of similar thematic nature came up at that time when Wilde wrote it, i.e. more than 100 years ago. But the rift between lovers, distance between husband and wife due to an outsider is, quite, recurrent - both in life and in fiction. Therefore, the point of the play is not a mind numbingly ingenious plot. It is also not about treating a hitherto unseen subject with radical new waves of thought. Lady Windermere's Fan is a story that has been done and dusted innumerable times. It is Wilde's maverick expertise with words which sutures a conventional plot and rapt attention of the reader. His words travel like a fresh breeze, nurturing every cell of the mind, invigorating the entire experience of reading.
And that is where precisely Wilde's gifted talent is. How wonderfully he crafted this play with an exquisite array of words - like a seductress putting her most delicate charm - words - sometimes spoken sardonically, sometimes guilelessly, sometimes draped with a vile, caustic tone and sometimes words rendezvous with primal passion and love. It is a majestic artistry. Truth be told, I felt as if I am reading a top-notch suspense thriller. That is how he structured the play - the right person coming at the right point and thus seizing complete, entire attention of the reader. There are endless foray of brilliant one-liners depicting the amazing wit of the person with the pen.
"My dear Arthur, I never talk scandal. I only talk gossip." - "What is the difference between scandal and gossip?" - - "Oh, gossip is charming. History is merely nothing. But scandal is gossip made tedious by morality."
"That is the worst of women. They always want one to be good. And if we are good, when they meet us, they don't love us at all. They like to find us quite irretrievably bad, and to leave us quite unattractively good."
"No, we are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars."
"I never seem to meet any but good women. The world is perfectly packed with good women. To know them is a middle-class education." - "This woman has purity and innocence. She has everything we men have lost." -- "My dear fellow, what on earth should we men do going about with purity and innocence? A carefully thought-out buttonhole is much more effective."
"What is a cynic?" - "A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing." -- "And a sentimentalist, my dear Darlington, is a man who sees an absurd value in everything and doesn't know the market price of any single thing."
"Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes."
Read it fellas. Read it. Please read it for an elegantly graceful read. ...more
This is not a review, some blabbering that I decided to jot down.
Forget aesthetics. Enough of that has been written and discussed. Nabokov's word playThis is not a review, some blabbering that I decided to jot down.
Forget aesthetics. Enough of that has been written and discussed. Nabokov's word play, imagery, style all of them have been critically analyzed by a lot more competent persons than I am.
What was concerning me when I started to read this is that this is story of a pedophile, narrated by none other than the pedophile. A loathsome creature, abject human being - if human being at all - indeed. Based on that prerogative, just from that focal point, the prospective reader can discern that a book which deals with pedophilia is a contemptuous thing and should be hated and/or should not be read. And this is where that pristine theory of 'let's not talk about immorality' should be derelict. As Nabokov himself wrote, judging a piece of fiction just because of its theme is a little ludicrous (well entirely ludicrous, if you ask me). How about indulging the grey cells of the brain into a bit more perspiration (or orgy - sorry about that, couldn't resist).
I think in every society, in every part of the world, there exists a finite set of social taboos. Just for an example, in the part of world which I inhabit, talking about sex would result an instant arch of eyebrow. I am not stereotyping here, it is just how things are. Now, I am not either trying to justify or vilify talking sex. But the point that I am trying to make is that the reception of the topic is muted when we speak of sexuality and I am not talking about an intercourse here, I am talking about an overall perception, discussion or at the very least, opening your mind to the very possibility of such a discussion. Just as any other topic like education or crime or whatsoever.
And this is where I think, Lolita, is important. Tremendously important. It shouldn't be bifurcated either as good or evil but it should merit a discussion of where the line blurs and how the line is being blurred. Is it just a story of post-coital jubilation of a 37 year old with a 13 year old girl and thus inherently must be thrown into the bag which always smells of pungent, acrid poison? Or does it make the reader think about the vicious criminality of infamous Dr. Humbert Humbert who later realized his horrible sin of 2 perpetuating years. Now, our narrator is downright one of the most vile characters I have come across, if not the vilest. The affinity which he tries to structure as 'love' in the second part of the book - to me - is just pure 'lust'. Absolutely abrasive, one-sided, evil lust. And that is not because he is a criminal, but he is, a pathologically methodical and insidiously rotten to the core of his heart. He not only rapes the child but he keeps her senses numb under mutilating, crushing weight of physical and mental torture and behold, then he keeps devising ways as to how he can keep the torrent of rapes going. We see a morbid cretin if focused beyond the soft gelatin of those radiant eyes. One part of his abominable musings that caught my eyes is this.
" ... I would have to get rid somehow of a difficult adolescent whose magic nymphage had evaporated - to the thought that with patience and luck I might have her produce eventually a nymphet with my blood in her exquisite veins, a Lolita the Second...bizzare, tender, salivating Dr. Humbert, practicing on supremely lovely Lolita the Third the art of being a granddad."
What abysmal, putrefying thought.
But this same rapist, after a number of years, finds Lolita as an expectant mother and realizes that, he had mercilessly trampled and violated each and every law/ethic/morality/right known to the human kind. He has irrevocably ruined her childhood to such a degenerating mess that even self-immolation wouldn't be enough to absolve the sin. This is where we note,
"I covered my face with my hand and broke into the hottest tears I had ever shed. I felt them winding through my fingers and down my chin, and burning me, and my nose got clogged, and I could not stop..."
'Genuine, on the surface, eh reader?' - probably what Nabokov thought.
And then comes the masterstroke. Did he want to kill her when she refused to go along with him. The putrid flesh that he is, he might do the same.
"Then I pulled out my automatic - I mean, this is the kind of fool thing a reader might suppose I did. It never even occurred to me to do it."
Only a sinisterly genius writer as Nabokov can do this.
And this is where Lolita is important. This is not merely a story of a pedophile, plus lush landscape, plus brilliant storytelling, plus thrill to know the deepest, darkest corners of mind of a psychopath.
But this is a piece of art. This is a sublime yet historically important piece of art that unquestionably deserves to be read by generations after generations. Think of the sacrilegious crimes of the erudite H.H. Can any human heart beat any cord that might resonate with putrid Humbert's? No. But it did, didn't it? And a writer who can inflict that is not immoral and his writing is not immoral. The book which can evoke such a feeling is not immoral but an astounding, monumental achievement in literature and art. This is a book which has managed to perturb the linearity of wholesome hate toward a pedophile.
Do Read.
P.S - I have little clue as to where I reached or what points did I make after declaring awe for this book. But, I guess that doesn't matter. It is a supreme example of art and any reader can dissect it in any way possible. ...more
Imagine a world - where the past is continuously being altered, where verbs as we know in English language are dramatically being filtered, where empiImagine a world - where the past is continuously being altered, where verbs as we know in English language are dramatically being filtered, where empirical thinking is being considered as a heinous crime. Imagine a world - where since the time you wake up in the morning till the time you go to bed, you are under a continuous surveillance, where the foods you have in your plate come after authorization from state, where the information you read or see or hear is a product of an interminable osmosis by a totalitarian regime where truth is swiftly denounced and the most preferable lies are carefully cohered and become truth.
It is a world where you are not free to formulate a theory on your own in your own mind. You are not allowed to take a stroll in an evening by yourself. You are not allowed to produce a heretical facial expression or gesture in public or in private that might appear detrimental to the state's interest and thus against the party manifesto. It is a world where children spy on their parents to see whether they whisper anything out of their breath which in any semblance could be structured as a derogatory remark to the party and thus can be denounced and indicted as having committed 'Thought-crime'.
It is a world where an individual is supposed to form a seamless integration between truth and lie, thereby alienating the differential line of good and bad and in the process of doing so, he dumps the right emotion into an endless abyss of gutter and believes the wrong. But this belief is temporary and cannot be achieved simultaneously. Here the mind automatically and unconsciously switch between the truth and the lie depending on what is expected and required from him at the precise point in time. And the individual becomes a true practitioner of 'Doublethink'. And since under this regime, human emotions can always be curtailed and actions can be restricted to a certain degree, words which represent them can be dismissed. Such as the word 'bad' can be substituted with un-good, better can be rephrased as gooder and best as goodest. This theory of cauterizing grammar, vocabulary and literature is what is called 'Newspeak', where variations of a single word is sufficient to express a myriad of meanings, facilitating elimination of the other useless words and verbs, as seen fit by the party.
George Orwell was a visionary. He saw, imagined and wrote about circumstances which didn't happen before 1984, didn't happen in 1984 and in all honesty, I don't believe, will ever happen. But, should the reader consider the events and the theories as allegorical references, it all become vivid, very vivid. Personally I can pick up the fragment about doublethink and can relate with it instantaneously. Because I see events in similar vein happening in the industry where I am professionally associated. Forget that, let's extend the analogy a bit more. We all know or at least acknowledge the hazards of processed food/soft drinks yet the 'sensory-specific-satiety' never wanes out and the consumer feels like having more of it even though he clearly knows that that is not right. However the craving goes on. It's like the mind is paralysed to take the right decision. Our conscience can very well demarcate the line of right and wrong but it succumbs to some extraneous factor, some manufactured helplessness that surrounds it. How to manufacture that? Exploit any human instinct - fear, hatred, love, affection, power, wrath - the list is endless.
In 1984, this is precisely what the Socialist party of Oceania was doing. Everywhere in the land, in every conceivable place, the face of Big Brother follows you. Look at it from any angle and the eyes will never stop watching you. Wake up in the morning and the voice from telescreen starts dictating your routine. Go and sit in your office cubicle to serve a fixed set of orders. Take part in party directed community activity. Have lunch with the same insipid substances day in and day out. Make yourself available for group recreation against your wish. Go to your room and sleep. Rinse and repeat. In every second of the day, you are being constantly monitored by the omnipresent telescreen and more sinisterly, under constant probing of the infamous thought-police who are always lurking for any possible gesture or whisper or expression that might allude to the notion that you are against the dictates of the party.
In 1984, George Orwell gives a chilling account of an absolute totalitarian regime which mandates complete submission of an individual. Not figuratively but literally. Not only by your actions but also by your thoughts and mind. 1984 is past and nothing of what Orwell prophesied happened. However, the savagery of the party displayed here will not only absorb the reader with a spine-chilling delirium but also with the force of a bone-crushing, mutilating dagger that looms above the head, unseen but ready to scathe at any possible point in space and time. It all comes to a boiling point where the protagonist, Winston Smith, gets captured by thought-police and is deported to a cell with other captives. There they learn about 'Room 101' and Smith observes the unnatural horror that prevails at the mere mention of it. The horror is that sort of the venereal disease at the thought of which, the very centre of human existence shudders. George Orwell described a society where human life revolved around three principles of Ingsoc. Principles built on the foundation of doublethink.
War is peace, Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
In that authoritarian regime no dissent is tolerated and not unpunished for. In that acrid, thought-choking atmosphere the human mind is just another malleable substance, exposed and vulnerable to any kind of impregnation by the party. It is a society where it is not enough to be submissive to the apex of the party, it is imperative to love him. Because, 'Big Brother is watching you'. In Oceania, under Ingsoc (the socialist party), an independent thought is not only reformed but the thought-bearer is given a new birth by the 'Ministry of Love' (again doublethink) after which his heart can only accrue and realize love for Big Brother, love for the party. An uncompromising, utterly submissive, overflowing love where one inch of fluctuation means perish. As for the foundation of the party, it exists on oligarchy. It needn't be one leader worship all the time, it could be a select group i.e. inner party and the transmission of power among members of the group is smooth, without any peril.
Why Orwell wrote 1984 can be found in his letter to Noel Willmett (available in Internet). It is to be noted that although Orwell was a preacher of a democratic populous, he knew his realism as well. Fully aware of the war and the one-man leadership which were assailing the world at that time (second world war), he wrote -
"You also ask, if I think the world tendency is towards Fascism, why do I support the war. It is a choice of evils - I fancy nearly every war is that. I know enough of British imperialism not to like it, but I would support it against Nazism or Japanese imperialism, as the lesser evil. Similarly I would support the USSR against Germany because I think the USSR cannot altogether escape its past and retains enough of the original ideas of the Revolution to make it a more hopeful phenomenon than Nazi Germany. I think and have thought ever since the war began, in 1936 or thereabouts, that our cause is the better, but we have to keep on making it the better, which involves constant criticism."
As a casual reader and admirer of good books, I can't recommend it enough. And in all honesty, I don't consider myself eligible enough to review it. This should be a staple read at schools, colleges and everywhere. A true classic in all aspect of the word, a masterpiece. ...more
I don't know for sure, but this book, could very well be, the best book that I have read (if such a sentence does exist, in fact). It is a horrid descI don't know for sure, but this book, could very well be, the best book that I have read (if such a sentence does exist, in fact). It is a horrid description of evolution of human beings, a painfully honest observation of our own kind. Abundant in rich allegory, while seeping through your mind it makes you feel squeamish of your own very existence.
After ousting tyrant human masters, all the animals of 'Manor Farm' took the upholding of themselves in their own capacity. Henceforth, seven commandments were put forward which solemnly translated to one singular line of immolation between the animals. Rats and rabbits, hens and ducks, horses and donkeys, pigs and dogs, cows and cats, all truthfully vowed to abide by the rule-
'Four legs good, two legs bad.'
They renamed 'Manor Farm' as 'Animal Farm'.
This motto gave them the remittance from their old days of hardship and they fervently looked forward for the upcoming days of glory. They, only the animals, will reap the benefits of what they will sow. In unison, all of them started to work hard and harder. Some even took onus of the entire group into individual shoulders. The theory was simple and bold, something all of them understood in crystal-clear detail, which is
'All animals are equal.'
When an army goes to war, someone stays at concrete house and barks orders. The soldiers perform their duties with blood and sweat. They work for something the world knows nothing about, which is shrewdly guarded by the heinous felony of lie, that reads something called 'greater good'. In the same vein, when all the animals were working, pigs took the great difficulty of giving orders to the working group. The job of calculating the yield of food grains, broadcasting the exponentially emanating rays of happiness were their job. The valour of working together, side by side, radically diminished and words like 'files, reports, minutes and memorandum' took over. Soon, rationing of food was limited to the animals but stash of luxury items became need of the hour for the pigs and dogs, their guards. The vague uneasiness, the undercurrent of dissent among other animals were erased by the shrewdest pig, called Sqealer. Words hitherto unknown, 'tactics, leaders, arrangement, readjustment' came into existence. What followed next is a pejorative act by the pigs who amended the rules and established trading relationship with humans which later transformed to dinner cocktail party in the farmhouse.
This entire book, from first page to the last, is an outstanding work of art. Imagining the entire curve of human history in some 100 pages, is nothing short of work of a genius. How many times in this book, the reader will slowly look over the page and swallow the ever-enhancing pit of hollowness into the shallow cavity of own mind. The avaricious nature of human beings and their incorrigible moral standing get downright slaps from the author at every possible angle. With astounding decadence of ethics, the lines of the seven commandments started to grow hazy and insipid words were added to them. For example, 'No animal shall sleep in a bed' became 'No animal shall sleep in a bed with sheets'. Acutely observant of political hedonism, this book, is a mind-bending read.
I can go on gushing the entire night about this. It is a glaring example of the rapacious act of power and how it tears down the commonplace people. A classic,timeless masterpiece which shows how ideals of rebellion, ethos of equal demographics all get buried in pernicious gaze of greed and corrosion of soul. Every word of this book is relevant in every fucking political, social scenario in today's world, where egregious mistakes of one are blamed onto another. Written in brilliant satirical tone, it shows the aerosol of solidarity shown by the cunning brain-workers who malignantly poison the entire world with a slow, subtle yet burning, decaying corruption of evolution and existence and power. As the once-flailing monotone of equality of the animals later got cauterized by the pigs and dogs and a new commandment was born.
'All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.'
George Orwell, you couldn't have chosen a better line. ...more
"... But it was my integrity that was important. Is that so selfish? It sells for so little, ut it's all we have left in this place. It is the very la"... But it was my integrity that was important. Is that so selfish? It sells for so little, ut it's all we have left in this place. It is the very last inch of us. But within that inch we are free."
And when Evey finally finds her freedom, unchains her mind from every possible cages trying to ensnare her liberated self, V pursues her.
"I know. Fiver years ago, I too came through a night like this. Naked under a roaring sky. Seize it. Encircle it within your arms. Bury it in your heart up to the hilt. Become transfixed. Become transfigured. Forever."
David Llyod said that "There aren't many cheeky, cheery characters in V FOR VENDETTA either; and it's for people who don't switch off the news.'
Alan Moore said that he and David Llyod both shared their political pessimism. They made it as a siphon to pump out the oppression and repression from a fascist, authoritarian police state and to this day, the comic is true in the anticipation of the totalitarian society.
Just as Thomas Jefferson said, "A government afraid of its citizens is a democracy. Citizens afraid of government is tyranny." ...more
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