The Man from Motihari - a need of the hour

The Man from Motihari comes as a need of the hour. The novel speaks in the almost now – we are surrounded by the kind of historical events which form the background of the story. Though set in a small region of one particular nation, such unfortunate happenings are being echoed around the world in our now. In a sense, Abdullah Khan captures this universality by sending his protagonist across the globe in the later part of the story.

The story serves another and much more reasonable function then telling us about these times. I use the word reasonable in the sense of a thing which can be reasoned out and which can thus prove functional. The Man from Motihari wants to write. He writes across all possible challenges of his circumstances. And his foray into this profession so unlikely in his world exposes him to all the steps and tips and traumas of writing. The book thus becomes a valuable guide or manual for those who want to write.

 The value of a book increases with the number of functions which it serves. The Man from Motihari, besides giving us history in the making, and telling us what it takes to be a writer, goes on to offer an anthropology and sociology of Bihari Muslims as well as anthropology and sociology of a section of our youth who seek education for jobs – the community of Indians of a certain age who struggle through bank and civil services exams.

As mentioned, novels with many dimensions sparkle like diamonds with every facet they task themselves to bring to light. So Abdullah Khan has well-honed his work and besides all the robust functions I’ve discussed above, he brings to the reader the clarion call for good quality education especially for girls.

Lest you imagine that since this book is so diverse in what it covers it might be boring, let me hasten to reassure you. It is a most delightful entertainer and a page turner feast. It has all the spicy delight to tickle the Indian palate and enough cosmopolitan garnish to please the epicure from elsewhere.

Stupidity Infection: Reading remedies

 Yesterday, I finally finished Moby Dick.

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Since the onset of the pandemic and the first strict lockdown, I felt as if I was on a desert island or in some other form of solitary confinement but with access to books. It is at times like this that one thinks of what remains to be done in life. For many today, that, for some extraordinary reason, involves bungee jumping. For others, especially since lockdown curtailed bungee jumping avenues, it became a chance to read the books one should read in a lifetime.

Time in such periods of solitary confinement becomes both endless and terribly short. One thinks about the time one has left on earth, in this odd combination of flesh and consciousness. Physically, we can only explore so very little of the world. And, temporally, we can only be in the now, physically speaking.

The only way, then, to be able to see a great deal of the world and to travel past our lifetimes in either direction, is to read. Great books describe places and things and people and more. They are a passport that is always valid to visit anywhere and anytime.    

And it is thus that I consumed War and Peace.

I felt a twinge of regret that such a book was not suggested to me when I was very young. After gobbling up the Tolstoy tomes, I fell upon that whale of a book – Moby Dick. And nibbled my way through the giant. Again, I wondered why such a book was not handy when I was at my most bookwormish. Yesterday, I completed the huge Herman Melville early in the day.

Around mid-afternoon, the Internet became sluggish and stuttered to a standstill. I spent some time investigating my offline hoardings – chanced upon some books I’d forgotten I had or had mislaid in my drive. I organised some other things too and finally, switching on a defrag, I took my Kindle and curled up on a sofa, looking forwards to 100 Eternal Masterpieces of Literature that I’d found there for free.

Alas, it had not been downloaded. And so I turned to the Kindle app on my phone and it is there that I found The Brothers Karamazov. 

Now I have read some Dostoevsky back in the day. I was terribly terribly young then and very odd. And so I read or tried to read The Idiot in French.

 

I would hardly browse a few pages before I became Prince Myshkin. 

Now, several decades later, I’m ready to take the plunge again to try and discover why so many people say one should read Crime and Punishment 

and why so many film versions of the Brothers book continue to come out.

And this is what I read:

Alexey Fyodorovitch Karamazov was the third son of Fyodor Pavlovitch Karamazov, a landowner well known in our district in his own day, and still remembered among us owing to his gloomy and tragic death, which happened thirteen years ago, and which I shall describe in its proper place. For the present I will only say that this “landowner”—for so we used to call him, although he hardly spent a day of his life on his own estate—was a strange type, yet one pretty frequently to be met with, a type abject and vicious and at the same time senseless. But he was one of those senseless persons who are very well capable of looking after their worldly affairs, and, apparently, after nothing else. Fyodor Pavlovitch, for instance, began with next to nothing; his estate was of the smallest; he ran to dine at other men's tables, and fastened on them as a toady, yet at his death it appeared that he had a hundred thousand roubles in hard cash. At the same time, he was all his life one of the most senseless, fantastical fellows in the whole district. I repeat, it was not stupidity—the majority of these fantastical fellows are shrewd and intelligent enough—but just senselessness, and a peculiar national form of it.

 

I was already unable to suppress a smile – such brutal truths and so eternal and yet as gentle as neighbourly gossip. I read a great deal more without feeling restless – it was that easy.

But it was not really my choice for my next read which was perhaps a Thomas Mann as some of his books are held in high esteem by my partner and I have never read anything of Mann. 

In the meantime, I’d also like to finish A Country Doctor's Notebook by Mikhail Bulgakov.

 

Even if lockdowns no longer loom, you are always free to retire to your desert island and open the treasure chest of books waiting to be read. Don’t waste your time on trash from the present for the works that have survived time hold many secret messages for you which will, time and again, help you through all the troubles of life whatever they may be and, if not, they will entertain and enrich you infinitely beyond anything bestsellers can supply. 

Maxwell's Demon: a useful devil!

Demons are scary and Maxwell's Demon is bound to be even more so. Maths and physics frighten many of us as much as any ghost or devil. But did you know that physicist James Clerk Maxwell, in 1867, actually birthed a demon in a thought experiment? 

In the thought experiment, a demon controls a small massless door between two chambers of gas. As individual gas molecules (or atoms) approach the door, the demon quickly opens and closes the door to allow only fast-moving molecules to pass through in one direction, and only slow-moving molecules to pass through in the other. Because the kinetic temperature of a gas depends on the velocities of its constituent molecules, the demon's actions cause one chamber to warm up and the other to cool down. This would decrease the total entropy of the two gases, without applying any work, thereby violating the second law of thermodynamics.

Most demons are rather useless in practice, because they simply don't exist. However, Maxwell's demon has helped scientists, pointing the way to overcome problems even in concrete aspects of life. 

To understand more about Maxwell's demon, try How Maxwell’s Demon Continues to Startle Scientists:

Ideas like this could prove useful in designing more efficient thermal systems, like refrigerators, or even in developing more advanced computer chips...

But, if that's too much too, try a short story based on Maxwell's pet thought experiment: Maxwell's Demon Went Down to Georgia.  

And, if that is also not your cup of tea, try this:

While too many humans still cling to beliefs about supernatural beings, and while such persons often end up causing devilish horrors in real life, there are also a number of people who prefer to flex the muscles of their brain to learn more about the world in which we live. So let's put all our mythical monsters into fiction where they belong and enjoy them only in stories.  

Our children would do better to learn more about Maxwell and other great minds than be brainwashed into primitive belief systems which are causing barbaric bloodshed in the present. James Clerk Maxwell produced his first scientific paper, “On the Description of Oval Curves,” when he was only fourteen! If parents can focus on reading to improve their knowledge of the world, rather than on consuming best sellers, would it not give a nation's children a better chance at improving the world?