The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

I read the book finally. I'm feeling just too spooked out right now to comment on it. A lot has been said on the book anyway. The messages are the same. Every religion has texts on similar lines. Yet, for those who haven't read it yet, its a very small delightful book. No harm in giving it a shot even if this sort of genre isn't exactly your taste.

A few lines I liked apart from the much touted 'The universe conspires to give you what you want':

• When you possess great treasures within you, and try to tell others of them, seldom are you believed.
• Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself.
• Every search begins with beginner's luck and every search ends with the victors being severely tested. The boy remembered an old proverb from his country, 'The darkest hour of the night came just before the dawn'.
• You must understand that true love never keeps a man from pursuing his destiny.
• "Maktub"
• Everything in life is an omen
  

PS: Almost everytime I have enjoyed reading a book, I have bought it without intention, purely by chance. Omen!? This time to merely complete the transaction in Rs.100, on a pavement of Mumbai. Hope the other book I bought with an intention wont be a disappointment!

The Walmart Decade - Robert Slater

Picked up out of curiosity in office library and also because I'm planning to get a closer look at the business of business some time soon.

Walmart the superstore of our times had huble beginnings in small-town America. Sam Walton's baby. He was a normal retailer who struck gold in terms of retailing ideas. Chucking middle men he began offering goods at much lower prices. The success of the concept, completely on a micro-scale yet, thrilled him. In a way Mr.Walton never even realised he was on his way to creating history. He just kept going, overthrowing mom&pop stores around the corner with his low-value tags.

Small-town America loved the personal touch of the stores. The founder gavce surprise visits to his stores every now and then to ensure his stores were not going away from his own philosophy. For many years, even as Walmart grew considerably he was not convinced about having separate departments or hierarchy within the organisation. He wasnt too keen on introducing technology either. Why does one need an HR department to take care of employees?? hehe Dilbert would love that.

I'm no big reader of management and leadership books but it was nice to know the past of Walmart and then towards the end of the book compare how its very strengths are today becoming legal issues. How a creator can never truly assess the growth of his baby, how the baby can continue to grow beyond the creator's wildest imaginations...Even after his death. The book takes a closer look at how Walmart continued its journey sans Sam.

Couldn't help thinking of BigBazaar as a wannabe Walmart, except that Indians are not Americans and BigBazaar is looking at metropolitan India instead of small town India. Is there scope? Debatable!

Blink - Malcolm Gladwell

Snap judgements, instinct, gut feel, first impressions, you have no idea how seriously our unconsious and consious is governed by them.

Don't believe me? Read Gladwell's book! He told me that. Like I needed more support to be impulsive! LOL I've always been that way but now I have scientific backing. One doesnt always need to look for reasons for feeling a certain way about a something or a someone. A 'why?' cannot always be answered...it remains mysteriously hidden from our reasoning powers.

Plenty of examples in the book and test results. First half was interesting and I scanned through the latter part. Not worth buying, better off borrowing like me :)

Q and A - Vikas Swarup

A bestseller, above all else, needs a good plot. Vikas Swarup struck gold in that sense with Q&A.

A poor waiter living in the biggest Asian slum in India wins 'Who wants to be a millionaire'. Nobody is ready to believe he could do it without cheating. How can a poor Indian waiter possibly speak English and have general awareness that defies logic?

Most of what the book has defies logic as well. It is the kind of book which makes one feel 'Hey I can write better!' but then 'just give me that higher plot'. So fine we'll hand it to Mr. Swarup. Afterall he is being chased by filmmakers now!

Ughh...basically no.. I didnt like the book.

PS: The author happens to be an Indian Diplomat. Trust these guys to churn up something that attracts the NRI or firang sensibilities about India being a land of oddities!

Memoirs of a Geisha

Was it really fiction? Maybe I was misled by the introduction where the writer speaks about how the Geisha did not want the memoirs to be published until she and the numerous luminaries she has mentioned from her past were dead.

Once again I am fascinated by Japanese culture, so much that I am tempted to learn their language and be among them. Generally I am bad at remembering unfamiliar names used in foreign books, but somehow all the names in this book seem so familiar and easy to remember. Maybe I was in Japan in one of my earlier lives.

Chiyo was a girl with a lot of water in her personality. How fascinating to describe people in terms of such esoteric natural attributes (later found out its got more to do with chinese astrology). Her grey eyes set her apart. To some extent her eyes perhaps wrote her destiny.

Snatched from a poor fisherman's family, she was delivered into Gion, the Geisha district of Japan, along with her elder not-so-pretty sister Satsu. She could never forgive her own 9-year-old intelligence for imagining that the person who actually sold her was going to give her a better life. The initial inexplicable torment of the two sisters is almost unbearable.

The tale of Chiyo turning into Sayuri is narrated by Chiyo herself, which makes the reader feel quite fortunate. First person accounts always seem more gripping, don’t they? And that is what every Geisha is good at anyway, entertaining wealthy Japanese men with personal stories, the verity of which only the narrators know. Pour sake, make traditional tea, play the Shamisen, perform the very emotive artistic dance, flirt, seduce, embarrass, be naughty - all arts that a Geisha had to be good at. In fact the word ‘geisha’ itself means ‘artisan’. If you think a geisha is a prostitute, please read the book to ward off any such misunderstandings. A true well known Geisha is a very respected woman, who could be called to attend parties hosted by the Prime Minister or the top-most businessman.

A lot of revelations come as a shock, especially the bidding over a Geisha’s mizuage, which is nothing but her virginity. The perverse bordering on childish mentality of grown men is worth a laugh or two. Discovering the reasoning behind the white painted faces of Geisha, their grand Kimonos, their hair-dos could be of as much interest to a man as a woman reading the book.

Every relationship of Chiyo is depicted with a certain feminine sensitivity. And to think that a man, Arthur Golden, has written the book! The contrast of a woman’s emotional vulnerability and a man’s steadfastness is best represented between Sayuri and Nobo, the scarred one-armed man, who takes a liking to Sayuri for all the right reasons.

World War2 ravaged Japan’s impact on a Geisha and on her many rich patrons comes as a surprise towards the second half of the book.

Compared to all the ups and downs in Sayuri’s life though, the book has a fairly happy ending.

Hideous Kinky

Imagine for a while you are a little girl with a hippie mother, who survives on paltry sums of money she receives from your father, who may not be her husband.

That is ‘Hideous Kinky’ in short - a book brimming with questions and new experiences. It comes with a very eye-catching yet misleading title, worth exploring for its own sake.

You move from England to Morocco, where people wear different clothes, have strange names and new magical discoveries await you at every corner. Like a bath in a Hamam where a lady scrubs you with a stone until you develop tiny beads of dirt that are washed off with a bucket of water to leave you feeling polished clean.

It is remarkable how Esther Freud has managed to capture and depict in such detail the tiny, otherwise inconspicuous oddities of little growing girls. With an equally clueless but smarter elder sister you keep guessing who your father is. Every new male friend your mother makes loves you intuitively and you build castles in the air. The book delicately captures emotion through simplicity: "Bilal was my Dad. No one denied it when I said so."

Julia, the mother, tries ingenious ideas to pool money whenever she finds time from her spiritual pursuits. The mystery around her true desires and wishes remains shrouded throughout causing some discomfort to the reader, but there is no time to dwell. The numerous characters encountered along the way, some without purpose, remain etched in mind thanks to vivid detailed descriptions.

The tale more than anything else brings home the reality that people make places. And ‘Hideous Kinky’ is a place worth visiting.

PS: The petite 300-page book will make a very good travel companion.

An Artist of the Floating World

I could not lay my hands on 'Remains of the Day' but under Kazuo Ishiguro's name I found another book titled 'An Artist of the Floating World' . The title strangely attracted me and the decent size of the book with the picture of a typical japanese lantern on cover beckoned too.

A photograph of the author in addition to the story-line behind the book confirmed that not only was the setting of the story Japanese but also the author. That made me wonder how could a Japanese man write a story like 'Remains of the Day' so beautifully, considering the very 'English' setting. But just found out that he was born in Nagasaki in 1954 and moved to England in 1960. That explains perhaps! He won the Whitbread Prize for 'Artist...'. I can see already that Kazuo likes building his stories around historic times.

As always I read the book with long breaks which means I did not fully grasp some parts and would love to give the book a re-read. Or perhaps the author intends to keep these slight questions and puzzles unsolved in the reader's head.

Masuji Ono the lead character.

His present: A former painter, now old with two daughters lives a quiet life, frequently going over his past, weighing the rights and wrongs of all that he did. Of his two daughters Setsuko is married and has a little smart boy of her own. The little exchanges between grandfather and his grandson were most entertaining. Ono is most occupied now with getting his other daughter, Noriko, wedded and hopes his past does not come in the way of the marriage negotiations.

His past: He was a painter of the 'floating world' of the then Japanese night life of pleasure, entertainment and drink. Following the rules laid down by his master, painting anything depicting reality different from pleasure and beauty was worthy of derogation and destruction. He deserted that life in the belief that an artist has a social responsibility too and can make his paintings a reflection of the gory truths of the then Japan. Unknowingly he joined a propagandistic campaign of the imperialists which eventually led Japan into World War II.

Now living in the remains of that war he sees both hope and confidence for Japan's future but cannot escape the ghosts of destruction either and haunting inner voices which hold him guilty for many deaths including that of his son's.

The book ends on a universal truth that people should be proud of moments in time when they did what they believed in...even if they failed, they had the conviction to risk it all when others sat on fences.

FLOATING: Of or like the lanterns belonging to the pleasure areas that were reflected below in the water, the mind of Ono, the constantly changing world around us, the beliefs that surface but are far reality.

PS: Would like to vist Japan some day. Their culture indeed seems very rich and polite on the verge of formal...yet beautiful. And what a coincidence that I see two Japanese couples greet eachother with the customary successive bows outside Jaipur! :)