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Tag: Excerpt

Angie Thomas’ books are important lessons on race, friendship and grief

Posted on by ashmita

Angie Thomas’ new book Concrete Rose returns to the site of her previous work, The Hate u Give, where the narrative events are catalysed by the police shooting of an unarmed black teenager. We’re returning to Thomas’ books, which are inspiring and necessary, delving into conversations around race, friendship, activism, and giving us characters that are unforgettable. Here is an excerpt from The Hate u Give:

 

A commotion stirs in the middle of the dance floor.

Voices argue louder than the music. Cuss words fly left and right.

front cover The Hate U Give
The Hate U Give||Angie Thomas

My first thought? Kenya walked up on Denasia like she promised. But the voices are deeper than theirs.

Pop! A shot rings out. I duck.

Pop! A second shot. The crowd stampedes toward the door, which leads to more cussing and fighting since it’s impossible for everybody to get out at once.

Khalil grabs my hand. “C’mon.”

There are way too many people and way too much curly hair for me to catch a glimpse of Kenya. “But Kenya—”

“Forget her, let’s go!”

He pulls me through the crowd, shoving people out our way and stepping on shoes. That alone could get us some bullets. I look for Kenya among the panicked faces, but still no sign of her. I don’t try to see who got shot or who did it. You can’t snitch if you don’t know anything.

Cars speed away outside, and people run into the night in any direction where shots aren’t firing off. Khalil leads me to a Chevy Impala parked under a dim streetlight. He pushes me in through the driver’s side, and I climb into the passenger seat. We screech off, leaving chaos in the rearview mirror.

“Always some shit,” he mumbles. “Can’t have a party without somebody getting shot.”

He sounds like my parents. That’s exactly why they don’t let me “go nowhere,” as Kenya puts it. At least not around Garden Heights.

–

© 2017 Angela Thomas, by permission of Walker Books Ltd.

 

~

Concrete Rose is a return to Garden Heights, seventeen years before the events depicted in The Hate U Give. It is a fierce and inspiring account of what it means to grow up as a black man in the United States. Here is an excerpt:

“That trifling heffa! And I don’t mean Iesha,” Ma says. “I mean her momma!”

Ma ain’t stopped fussing since we left the clinic.

At first I thought Iesha and Ms. Robinson stepped outside. Nah, they left. One of the nurses said she pointed out they were leaving the car seat. Ms. Robinson told her, “We don’t need it anymore,” and shoved Iesha out the door.

We went straight to their house. I banged on the doors, looked through the windows. Nobody answered. We had no choice but to bring li’l man home with us.

front cover Concrete Rose
Concrete Rose||Angie Thomas

I climb our porch steps, carrying him in his car seat. He so caught up in the toys dangling from the handle that he don’t know his momma left him like he nothing.

Ma shove the front door open. “I had a funny feeling when I saw all them clothes in that diaper bag. They shipped him off without a word!”

I set the car seat on the coffee table. What the hell just hap- pened? For real, man. I suddenly got a whole human being in my care when I never even took care of a dog.

“What we do now, Ma?”
“We obviously have to keep him until we find out what Iesha and her momma are up to. This might be for the weekend, but as trifling as they are…” She close her eyes and hold her forehead. “Lord, I hope this girl hasn’t abandoned this baby.”

My heart drop to my kicks. “Abandoned him? What I’m supposed to–”

“You’re gonna do whatever you have to do, Maverick,” she says. “That’s what being a parent means. Your child is now your responsibility. You’ll be changing his diapers. You’ll be feeding him. You’ll be dealing with him in the middle of the night. You—”

Had my whole life turned upside down, and she don’t care.

That’s Ma for you. Granny say she came in the world ready for whatever. When things fall apart, she quick to grab the pieces and make something new outta them.

“Are you listening to me?” she asks.
I scratch my cornrows. “I hear you.”
“I said are you listening? There’s a difference.”
“I’m listening, Ma.”
“Good. They left enough diapers and formula to last the

weekend. I’ll call your aunt ’Nita, see if they have Andre- anna’s old crib. We can set it up in your room.”

“My room? He gon’ keep me awake!”

She set her hand on her hip. “Who else he’s supposed to keep awake?”

“Man,” I groan.

“Don’t ‘man’ me! You’re a father now. It’s not about you anymore.” Ma pick up the baby bag. “I’ll fix him a bottle. Can you keep an eye on him, or is that a problem?”

“I’ll watch him,” I mumble.

“Thank you.” She go to the kitchen. “‘He gon’ keep me awake.’ The nerve!”

I plop down on the couch. Li’l Man stare at me from the car seat. That’s what I’m gon’ call him for now, Li’l Man. King Jr. don’t feel right when he my son.

My son. Wild to think that one li’l condom breaking turned me into somebody’s father. I sigh. “Guess it’s you and me now, huh?”

I hold my hand toward him, and he grip my finger. He small to be so strong. “Gah-lee,” I laugh. “You gon’ break my finger.”

He try to put it in his mouth, but I don’t let him. My fingernails dirty as hell. That only make him whine.

“Ay, ay, chill.” I unstrap him and lift him out. He way heavier than he look. I try to rest him in my arms and sup- port his neck like Ma told me to. He whimper and squirm till suddenly he wailing. “Ma!”

She come back with the bottle. “What, Maverick?”
“I can’t hold him right.”
She adjust him in my arms. “You relax, and he’ll relax.

Now here, give him the bottle.” She hand it to me, and I put it in his mouth. “Lower it a little bit, Maverick. You don’t wanna feed him fast. There you go. When he’s halfway through it, burp him. Burp him again when he’s done.”

“How?”
“Hold him against your shoulder and pat his back.”
Hold him right, lower the bottle, burp him. “Ma, I can’t—” “Yes, you can. In fact, you’re doing it now.”

~

Two beautiful, urgent reads that will stay with you.

 

 

 

 

Of childhood memories and Aai’s unforgettable life lessons

Posted on by vanyajaiswal

The evening prayers in the ashram are over. Cowbells tinkle sweetly in the distance. The residents of the ashram sit in a circle, their eyes fixed on Shyam, who has promised them a story as sweet as lemon syrup. And so Shyam begins.

While on some evenings he tells them of his boyhood days, surrounded by the abundant beauty of the Konkan, on others he recalls growing up poor, embarrassed by the state of his family’s affairs. But at the heart of each story is his Aai-her words and lessons.

Narrated over the course of forty-two nights, Shyamchi Aai is a poignant story of Shyam and Aai, a mother with an unbreakable spirit. Here, we are sharing an excerpt from the book where Shyam reflects on the relationship between his parents and how they had both taught him important life-lessons.

**

It was Bhau’s custom to go to the temple after he finished his puja at home. That was the signal for us to lay the plates for lunch. We would serve everything else before he came back except for the rice. When we saw him coming, we would call out, ‘Bhau’s here, Aai. Bhau’s here. Serve the rice.’ Bhau would bring back holy water from the temple. We would have that and then settle down to lunch.

That day, Aai had made a dish from sweet potato greens. She used to make tasty dishes from the leaves of all kinds of vegetables like pumpkins and ladies’ fingers. She would say, ‘Anything can be made to taste good if it’s tempered with a couple of spices and the right amount of salt and chilli powder are added.’ She was right, of course, because whatever she made did indeed taste good. The culinary deity seemed to dwell in her fingers. She would pour her heart and soul into everything she made.

However, that day was a little different. There was no salt in the vegetable dish she had made. With all the work she had to do, she had simply forgotten to put it in. Bhau didn’t mention it, so we didn’t either. Bhau’s self-control was unbelievable. Every time Aai offered him another helping of the vegetable, he would say, ‘This is excellent.’ He neither added the salt that was served on his plate nor asked for any. Aai said to me, ‘Don’t you like the dish? You’re not eating it the way you normally do.’ Before I could answer, Bhau cut in with, ‘Now that he has started learning English at school, he’s not going to enjoy these rustic vegetables.’

front cover of Shyamchi Aai
Shyamchi Aai || Sane Guruji

 

‘Not at all,’ I protested. ‘If learning English is going to do that to me, I don’t want to learn it. Please don’t send me to school.’

Bhau said, ‘I said that only to make you angry. When you get angry, I know all is well with the world. You like jackfruit, don’t you? I’ll get one tomorrow from Patil Wadi. If I don’t find a tender one, you can have the pods boiled and spiced.’

Aai said, ‘Yes, please get one. We haven’t had jackfruit in a long time.’ Bhau went out to the verandah for his routine walk and prayers. After that he spun yarn for his sacred thread. The spinning disc was made of clay. The house rule was that all of us should know how to spin yarn.

Aai had finished clearing up and had now sat down for her lunch. I was sitting nearby. She took her first mouthful of the vegetable and discovered it had no salt. ‘Shyam, there’s no salt in this dish. None of you said so. Why didn’t you tell me? How could you eat this saltless dish?’

‘We said nothing because Bhau said nothing,’ I replied. Aai was very upset.

‘How did you eat this?’ she kept asking. ‘No wonder you didn’t have much. Otherwise you would have single-handedly finished half the lot. You like your vegetables. I should have known then. But what’s the use of saying it now?’

Aai was full of remorse for her mistake. She believed we should always give people the best we can, whatever it is. She felt she had been careless, not paid enough attention, lost her concentration on the job. She had done wrong and she refused to forgive herself.

Bhau had said nothing because he hadn’t wanted to upset her. She had spent so much time at the hearth breathing in all the smoke and fumes just to make food for us. Why find fault? Why not accept what was made as tasty? Bhau believed it was wrong to hurt the person who had cooked for you.

‘Friends, it is for us to decide who the finer human being was. Was my father the finer human being because he ate an unsalted dish as if it were the best he had ever eaten in the belief that it was better to control one’s tongue than hurt another’s feelings? Or was my mother the finer human being because she was upset over serving us something that wasn’t perfect, asked us why we hadn’t complained and wouldn’t forgive herself for her mistake? According to me, both were fine human beings.

Our culture is founded on self-control and contentment as well as on doing work as perfectly as possible. I learnt from my parents that we should aspire to both these virtues in life.’

**

 

 

Indian spirituality and Advaita philosophy

Posted on by ashmita

Not Many, But One combines knowledge from Sree Narayana Guru’s Advaita philosophy  and the latest findings of modern physics, astrophysics and life sciences to tackle some fundamental scientific and philosophical issues. Here is an excerpt from the second volume, which explores how Sree Narayana Guru revived the Advaita philosophy.

~

In India, religion and spirituality are used very often as synonyms. While religion is more to do with rituals, spirituality has more to do with one’s self or, the spirit. In India, spirituality and religion are inherent parts of the day-to-day living of people in all walks of life. In India, people belonging to all the major religions of the world coexist in harmony for centuries. We begin with Hinduism since it is the dominant religion in the subcontinent.

front cover Not Many But One Volume I
Not Many But One Volume I||G.K.Sasidharan

For the study of Indian spirituality, it is essential to understand the basic tenets of Hinduism, a rich, complex and deeply symbolic religion. Hinduism is otherwise known as sanatana Dharma, or the eternal truth/tradition/religion. the Vedas are considered as superhuman-divine revelations, revealed to sages and seers in higher states of communion with ‘the one’—the Absolute. the Vedas are believed to be the world’s most ancient scriptures.

The Absolute is understood in three ways: one, as Paramatma or nirguna (unattributed) Brahman (the unattributed, all-pervading aspect of the supreme); two, as saguna (attributed) Brahman (the supreme soul as the aspect of God within the heart of all beings); and three, as Parameswara, the Absolute in the Jagrat or visual feature.

The entire universe is an illusion, a Vivartha (reflected image) of the absolute reality. the absolute reality can be seen only by turning inward as if it is you or inside you. the Indian philosophy differentiates between ‘belief’ and ‘faith’. A belief may or can be true, whereas faith can never be so; though faith is very often used to mean acceptance. For example, in earlier times, the earth was believed to be flat (belief). now, we know precisely that the earth is spherical (faith). According to Hinduism, experience is the key to faith.

The mother, father and the guru are akin to God. Ahimsa or non-violence to all forms of life is a basic principle. nothing is considered bad so long as it is within limits and the body accepts it. Hinduism believes in the following aspects: An absolute ‘one’, all-pervading supreme being both immanent and transcendent, the creator of un-manifest reality, though it is the only ‘Reality’.

According to Karma, the law of cause and effect, each individual creates his own destiny by his thoughts, words and deeds. Karma is not fate; for man, his deeds create his own fate. God does not punish anyone; one reaps what he sows. the effect of his acts makes him take several births until all the debts of his deeds—good and bad—are returned. still, prayer and nobility give Divine Grace. Man is not a born sinner. Divine grace is equal for all. Hindu philosophy believes in equality of well-being for all— Lōkā Samasta Sukhinō Bhavantu.

Reincarnation (where the soul evolves through many births) continues until all Karma is resolved. then only one attains Moksha or liberation from the cycle of rebirth. this destiny is common for all souls—the existence of divine beings in unseen worlds, temple worship, rituals and devotion lead to communion with the ‘Devas’ or gods in other worlds.

front cover Not Many But One Volume II
Not Many But One Volume II||G.K. Sasidharan

The history of spirituality and religion in India extends back to the end of the Palaeolithic period. this is evidenced by early traces of it excavated from different parts of India. there is evidence of ‘fire worship’ and ‘mother goddess’ worship as early as 10,000 BCe to 30,000 BCe. In Baghor situated near Kaimor escarpment Medhauli village in Madhya Pradesh, the excavated triangular stones and altars of fire worship seem to be 30,000 years old. A triangular stone was found incised with triangles, marked in red ochre, at an altar for a goddess. even today this practice continues in many villages in India, where similar stones, smeared in red and incised with triangles are offered to village deities. the triangular shape is generally taken as the basis for creating yantras, which are used for the worship of various deities. In the Indus Valley civilization (Harappan civilization) Kalibangan proto-Harappan age (3500 BCe–2500 BCe), they practised worship of the mother goddess, phallic worship and worship of a male god.

The new ideas of spirituality built up through the last couple of centuries, combining Western materialistic ideas with mystical traditions of Asia; especially of Indian religions. the ultimate endeavour was to find the truth of the individual’s entity ‘I’. With the advent of translations of Hindu texts in the West, mostly during the last century, transcendentalist thoughts started influencing Western thought, which led to the endorsement of universalist ideas and to Unitarian Universalism.

The theosophical society that searched for sacred teachings in Asian religions contributed to the major influence on model spirituality. It was influential on several Asian religions, especially on neo-Vedanta, the revival of theravada Buddhism, and Buddhist modernism, which adopted modern Western notions of personal experience and Universalism and incorporated them in their religious perception.

The perpetual philosophy of Asian tradition furthered the influence on the Western model of spirituality. An important influence on Western spirituality was neo-Vedanta, also called neo-Hinduism and Hindu Universalism, a model interpretation of Hinduism which developed in response to Western thoughts and oriental thoughts. the Unitarianism and the idea of Universalism were brought to India by missionaries and had a major influence on neo-Hinduism. this universalism was further popularized and brought back to the West as neo-Vedanta by swami Vivekananda.

~

The translations, explanations and commentary given in the two volumes of Not Many, But One are simple and conceivable by ordinary readers who may not be well equipped to grasp the complexities of the intuitional spiritual findings of Advaita and hypothetic conclusions of quantum physics-but without compromising on the authenticity of the works.

 

The politics of a religious society

Posted on by ashmita

Journalist Khaled Ahmed examines how religion became intricately stitched into the fabric of Pakistan’s political and social framework. Read an excerpt from his book Pakistan’s Terror Conundrum:

 

The state of Pakistan was founded on the ‘consensus’ that it has to be Islamic. As a religious state, it seeks sharia as an ideal. All states must seek an ideal as their foundational teleology. There is muted disagreement between ideologues and pragmatists over this ideal. It is muted because of intimidation, but it is definitely there, especially after the Talibanization of the country through illegal action by the Islamists. It is the threat of religion as an extra-legal force that is causing many Pakistanis to wonder if the state can move forward into the future with Islam as its credo.

Front cover Pakistan's Terror Conundrum excerpt
Pakistan’s Terror Conundrum||Khaled Ahmed

…It is interesting to note that when in 1949 the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan adopted the Objectives Resolution, it used the less-threatening terms ‘Quran’ and ‘Sunnah’ rather than sharia, which later came to be embedded in Article 203(C) of the Constitution and is related to the Federal Shariat Court. The politicians who signed the resolution knew nothing about what the ‘guiding code’ meant, as they reassured the non-Muslim members that they would be equal citizens. The non-Muslims, not easily consoled, came down to Lahore only to learn from the clerics that they would be zimmis (non-Muslim subjects of a state governed according to the sharia) who would have to pay a special tax. When General Zia shoved the Objectives Resolution into the Constitution through the 8th Amendment, he removed the word ‘freely’ from the sentence, which assured the non-Muslims that they would be able to practise their religion freely. No notation was made in regard to the change of text. In 1949, the resolution had ‘God Almighty’ in its first paragraph; it was changed to ‘Almighty Allah’ in 1953 without any reference to the assembly that had passed it. The guiding principles, passed off as harmless in 1949, became menacing for both Muslims and non-Muslims with the passage of time.

Pakistan became less and less viable as it converged on sharia. Jihad used to be the grand Islamic subterfuge, confusing the world about war and ‘peaceful effort’; now it is straightforward qital (killing). It used to be accepted that jihad could only be declared by the state. Now it is consensually privatized and internationalized, thus undermining a fundamental function of the state. On the law of evidence, if a scholar leans on the Quranic text to challenge the clergy on the half testimony of a Muslim woman, he is told to shut up because sharia has already decided the matter. Sharia is what fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence) makes of the Quran and Sunnah. An Egyptian professor at the Saudi-funded International Islamic University of Islamabad contended that infibulation (female circumcision) was sharia in Egypt, under the practiced Shafi’i fiqh, but banned ‘wrongly’ under the official Hanafi fiqh.

… An Islamic state intent on a sharia-based revolution embraces isolationism as its programme, almost like the Stalinist slogan of socialism-in-one-country. After 1947, the state misunderstood itself as a castle of Islam. It fondly thought of itself as a society cut-off—that is what the word ‘castle’ means—from the rest of the world, with an ability to stand up to hostile sieges. It also presaged the totalitarianism of the clergy after the ‘modern’ state was overthrown. Pakistan also allowed the transnational concept of the umma to inform its ideology. It acknowledged that the concept of the nation state was not compatible with its teleology because of the concept of umma.

When it tested its first atom bomb, the state of Pakistan could not for long keep up the pretended doctrine that it was India- specific. It was soon acclaimed as an Islamic bomb, a transnational weapon that would threaten not only India but many other states across the globe. The moment it became a religious bomb, its transformation into a sectarian one was inevitable. Many respectable scholars believe that Pakistan’s Sunni bomb caused Iran’s Shia bomb to be produced. Just as a religious state Pakistan cannot avoid becoming a sectarian one, conceptually, its bomb too threatens Iran, in addition to threatening the entire non- Muslim world.

The terrorist outreach of political Islam is being opposed by strong powers that have the capacity to strike at its incubation grounds. If this polarity is interpreted as Christianity versus Islam, then Islam doesn’t benefit from the neutrality of the non- Christian world either. In fact, the non-Christian world feels equally threatened and is inclined to forget its contradictions with the dominant Christian powers, seeking to form an alliance with it to confront Islam. Given this near-total opposition of the world, political Islam, thriving on lack of secular education, has little chance of surviving as a winning force. Political Islam can only eat its own children.

The Islamic state is not viable in modern times unless Islam is reinterpreted. This is not the project of Islam today; this inclination to change the world by force to fit sharia. This springs from the intellectual attitude of not rejecting the premise when it fails to encompass reality. The suicide bomber of today is an agent of forcible change of reality to the premise of Islam. When not democratic, the Muslim state begins its process of decline as a state denying rights; when Islamic, it begins its process of decline under challenge from the clergy; when theocratic, it achieves stability by suppressing demands for rights under the doctrine of fasad fil ard (corruption on earth). The theocratic stage is the terminal stage, after which the state is either undone or finds refuge in reverting to the identity of the modern state with economic imperatives overriding religious passions. Pakistan is in the process of entering the terminal phase and is looking at itself once again in 2020, hesitating in the face of a possible negative reaction from a scared world.

~

Pakistan’s Terror Conundrum is a gripping examination of the origin story of Pakistan’s ideals, and how religion became the driving force behind Pakistani nationalism.

 

 

The real cost of COVID-19

Posted on by ashmita

By now it is more than evident that the pandemic was different for the rich and the poor. Arun Kumar’s stellar research in his book Indian Economy’s Greatest Crisis  helps us understand the real cost of the pandemic and those who have had to bear it.

~

The Plight of Labour and Migrants

…The pandemic has brought into the open the terrible plight of the unorganized sector and its workers. They are the marginalized in society and policy seldom caters to their issues. They could not cope with the lockdown and now continue to suffer even with the lockdown eased under business pressure. …Without adequate testing, a large number of people will get infected as lockdown is eased. For herd immunity, if 60 per cent get the disease and develop immunity, 5 per cent of those infected will be serious, requiring hospitalization. That would be 4 crore people and most of them will be workers forced to go to their place of work. The poor are malnourished and don’t have the resources to get tested or get proper medical treatment. Even if only 2 per cent die, and this number will be larger if India’s weak medical system fails, 1.6 crore people will die—and most of them will be the poor.

 

Uncivil Conditions That the Urban Poor Live In

… Why was our medical system so weak and testing inadequate even months after it became clear in March that the disease would spread? It is a reflection of a political system and an executive that has hardly ever prioritized the welfare of the vast majority of the people it is supposed to serve. They are the residual, or the one’s marginalized in policymaking. If some benefits trickle down to them, that is well and good. If the poor rise above a given poverty line, the system claims it an ‘achievement’. The elite make it out that the poor ought to be grateful for the gains they have made since Independence.

The ‘achievement’ hides the uncivil conditions in which the poor live, especially in urban areas, and this now stands exposed thanks to the pandemic. They live in cramped and unhygienic slums, with little access to clean water and sanitary conditions. How are they to observe the lockdown and practise physical distancing? They live cheek by jowl and share toilets and water tankers. They have little savings, so they have to earn and spend on a day-to-day basis. With the pandemic, their earnings have stopped and they have turned destitute—this highlights the precariousness of their lives. One shock and they slip below the poverty line; one major illness in the family and they fall below the imaginary poverty line (Kumar, 2013). They had always been poor, but for policymakers, ‘progress’ was that they had jumped above the poverty line (APL).

 

Cause of the Mass Migration

…Industry and ruling elites capitalize on the poor working and living conditions of labour to lead their own comfortable lifestyle and make higher profits. Consequently, neither the state nor businesses grant workers their rights. For instance, a large number of workers do not get a minimum wage, social security or protective gear at worksites. They mostly have no employment security; often their wages are not paid in time; muster rolls are fudged; and there is little entitlement to leave. Given their low wages, they are forced to live in uncivilized conditions in slums. Water is scarce, and drinking water more so. Access to clean toilets is limited and disease can spread rapidly. There is a lack of civic amenities such as sewage. Their children are often deprived of schools and playgrounds.

front cover Indian Economy's Greatest Crisis - excerpt
Indian Economy’s Greatest Crisis||Arun Kumar

Now, using COVID-19 as an excuse, state after state has reduced even what little security was available to workers, by eliminating or diluting various laws to favour businesses. In Uttar Pradesh, at least fourteen of the Acts have been changed, such as the Minimum Wages Act, 1948, the Industrial Disputes Act, 1947, and the Payment of Bonus Act, 1965. It’s the same thing in Madhya Pradesh and Punjab. The plea is that this is needed to revive economic activity. The chief minister of Madhya Pradesh has said that this will lead to new investment in the state (Singh, 2020).

…In India, workers are characterized as either organized or unorganized. Those in the former category work in larger businesses and have some formal rights (which are being diluted) but, often, they find it difficult to have them enforced. Increasingly the big and medium businesses are employing contract labour provided by labour contractors from the unorganized sector, rather than permanent workers. Businesses pay contractors, who then pay the labourers part of the money they receive. So businesses claim that they are paying the minimum wage but the workers aren’t getting it.

In a scenario where even the minimum wage is inadequate for a worker to lead a dignified life, what chance do those receiving even lesser stand to lead a civilized existence?

Businessmen who now talk of livelihood have never shown such concern for the workers in the past. They have paid low wages to earn big profits. How else, at such a low level of per capita income, could India have had the fourth largest number of billionaires in the world? Clearly, most of the gains of development over the past seventy-five years, more specifically since 1991, have been cornered by businessmen. They have made money not only in white but also huge sums in black (Kumar, 1999).

Businesses have manipulated policy in their favour—before 1991, by resorting to crony capitalism, and since then by bending policy in their favour, curtailing workers’ rights and pressurizing the government to weaken its support to the marginalized sections on the plea that the markets be allowed to function. Now using COVID-19 as the shield, workers’ rights are being further curtailed. No wonder, then, that the country collects only about 6 per cent of the GDP as direct taxes despite huge disparities. The burden of taxation falls on the indirect taxes, such as GST and customs duty, paid by everyone, including the marginalized.

The lesson to be learnt from the pandemic is that India has not been able to cope with it because of the adverse living conditions of the majority of its people, namely the poor. Now labour laws are being diluted (such as increased working hours and reduced wages), which means a worsening of their living conditions (Kumar, 2020g). This will ensure that the country will flounder again when the next pandemic strikes. The tragedy is that India is today headed towards societal breakdown for short-term gains of some sections of society. But it appears that a rethinking of the prevailing ruling ideology always comes at a heavy cost.

~

Indian Economy’s Greatest Crisis  is a detailed and insightful work examining the various fault lines of the Indian social fabric and how they’ve been affected by the pandemic.

Salma’s women live fragile lives but dream of hope

Posted on by ashmita

Salma’s women dream of a better world and better lives. Caught up in their circumstances, this simple dream seems more and more distant. Read an excerpt from Women, Dreaming, translated into English by Meena Kandasamy:

 

Parveen runs as though her head is falling apart. Seeing Amma, Hasan and a few others chase her, she runs even faster. The panic of being captured makes her run without paying heed. She runs bounding across walls, past open grounds, she runs and runs…

Waking suddenly out of this nightmare, Parveen was very relieved that no one had caught her. Drenched in sweat, lazy and reluctant to get out of bed, she started thinking about the nature of her dream, what she could recollect of it, the dregs of an earlier life that tormented her now in the form of fantasy. She hated it. She pinched herself to make sure that she had really got away – and that made her overjoyed – then she once again raided her memories.

Meanwhile, downstairs… ‘Her mother has come to visit Rahim’s wife,’ Hasina heard the violent disdain in Iqbal’s voice. Absorbing her husband’s words, Hasina gathered her loose hair, tied it up in a bun and slowly made her way out of her bedroom. Because she could not see anyone in the living room, she shouted, ‘Parveen, Parveen,’ her voice loud enough to display her authority as mother-in-law.

Parveen shouted back, ‘Maami, here I come,’ as she rushed down the stairs. Hasina saw Subaida trailing behind her daughter. Responding to Subaida’s muted salaam with a loud and prolonged ‘wa ‘alay- kum al-salaam,’ Hasina sat down on the sofa.

When Subaida asks her how she is doing, her tone is reverential, its politeness exaggerated. Hasina’s cold response – ‘By the grace of Allah there is no dearth of wellness here’ – comes across as slightly menacing. Although Subaida is upset that Hasina hasn’t asked her to take a seat, she hesitantly stoops to perch on a corner of the sofa.

Parveen is annoyed and angered by her mother- in-law’s tone and manner, but she quickly pacifies herself, refusing to show any sign of being perturbed.

Front cover Women Dreaming
Women, Dreaming||Salma

‘You took the stairs to be with your daughter without first paying your respects to me,’ Hasina remarked. Subaida, registering the reason for Hasina’s displeasure, attempts to placate her: ‘You were sleeping, that’s why I went to talk with Parveen. It has been two weeks since I saw my daughter, you see, so I was very eager…’

This makes Parveen even angrier, to watch her mother plead and try to make peace in such a cringing act of deference.

Perhaps because Hasina had just woken from a nap, her face appeared to be bloated. She had not parted her jet-black hair, merely tied it up into a loose knot, not a hint of grey visible. Parveen compared her mother’s veiled head; most of Amma’s hair had gone white although both women were of the same age.

‘Here, I have brought some snacks,’ Subaida extended a bag that she had brought with her towards Hasina, who rejected it casually.

‘Why? Who is there to eat them here?’

Parveen ground her teeth in anger – this was all too much to take.

‘So, what happened to your promise of buying a car for us? This Eid or the next one?’

Parveen caught the sarcasm in Hasina’s sudden barb. She looked towards her mother to see how she would react.

Parveen could not forget that this was the same Hasina who on the day of Parveen’s marriage to her son had said, ‘She is not your daughter – from this day, she will be my daughter, she will ease my pain of not having given birth to a girl.’ She wondered if her mother, too, was ruminating on something similar that Hasina had told them in the past…
‘It has been three months since the nikah. When are you going to make good on your promise? Your daughter doesn’t understand the first thing about how to conduct herself. She appears to be unfit for any sort of domestic work, as if she was a college-educated girl. Even after I’ve got a daughter-in-law, I’m the one stuck in the kitchen.’

Subaida regretted having come here. Parveen was meanwhile chastised by Hasina: ‘Why are you standing here like a tree – go and fetch some tea for the both of us.’

Parveen moved towards the kitchen. She was curious to know what excuse her mother was going to provide for the demand of a car – but she also knew that she did not have the strength to listen to her spineless words. They must not have promised a car. Why should they have sought an alliance like this? What was wrong with her? Why did they arrange this wedding? She understood nothing.

She filtered the tea into a tumbler. She carefully stirred only half a spoon of sugar in her mother-in- law’s cup, knowing that she had to keep an eye on her sugar intake.

Though Parveen had eagerly awaited her mother’s arrival, her foremost instinct now was that Amma should leave here immediately. She had wanted to share as many things with her as possible, but now she decided not to confide in her at all. She only wanted her mother to return home peacefully.

With shaking hands, she extended the cup of tea towards her mother-in-law, then served Amma, looking at her intently for some clue.

Hasina, taking a sip and grimacing, remarked: ‘Hmm, it’s too sweet. Why have you poured so much sugar into this? There’s nothing you can do properly. In three months, you have not even learnt how much sugar to add in your mother-in-law’s tea. Go, add some milk to my cup and bring it back.’

Her harsh tone made Parveen feel crushed. She worked out that her mother’s response about the car must have displeased Hasina. She could see from her mother-in-law’s face how embittered and angry she felt.

The house wore a dreadful silence.

~

Women, Dreaming is a beautiful and painful read, both heart-breaking and hopeful at once.

What we learnt from the COVID-19 pandemic

Posted on by ashmita

In early 2020, the health sector in India was about to shift gears from the policy formulation stage to the implementation stage. It is at this point that the pandemic happened. The importance of having a robust public health system has never been felt more acutely. We have learnt a few things in these nine months into the pandemic, excerpted from Till We Win: India’s Fight against the COVID-19 Pandemic by Dr Chandrakant Lahariya, Dr Gagandeep Kang and Dr Randeep Guleria.

Well-functioning primary healthcare services as well as stronger public health services are essential to keep the society healthy: A majority of COVID-19 patients, nearly 80 per cent, needed only an initial interaction with health systems and no medical intervention during the entire period of recovery. They were either kept at CCCs, mainly to isolate them from healthy individuals, or were allowed home isolation. Such an approach reduced the risk of these patients transmitting the virus to others while visiting large facilities to seek care. Most of the interventions, be it contact tracing, testing, isolation or advising people on COVID-19-appropriate behaviour, were being delivered by primary care and public health staff. It is for this reason that countries with a stronger primary healthcare system (such as Thailand and Vietnam) fared much better than countries with a hospital-centric health system. Taiwan largely controlled the pandemic through effective testing and contact-tracing approaches, delivered through the primary healthcare and public health teams.

Neighbourhood clinics play a bigger role in ensuring good health than large hospitals: The pandemic has shown us the utility of smaller facilities over mega hospitals. In the early period of the outbreak, big hospitals became overburdened as all suspected and sick people thronged them. Panic led even patients with mild illness to rush to these hospitals. This drove home the point that a good referral system helps in balancing out the load of patient care and ultimately leads to better patient care. During the period of the pandemic, a majority of COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 services were provided by the PHCs and neighbourhood clinics.

front cover till we win
Till We Win||Dr Randeep Guleria, Dr Gagandeep Kang, Dr Chandrakant Lahariya

Health is about a broad range of services and providers:

To stay healthy, we all need much more than hospitals and doctors. Health services are a combination of public health (preventive, promotive services) as well as medical care (clinical/curative services), among others. If it were not for preventive and promotive health services, which help in reducing disease, hospital services would never be enough to treat all the people who get sick. Also, health needs multi-sectoral inputs, and the importance of sanitation and infection-control measures have now become more evident. Focusing on only one type of service will not suffice.

Non-pharmacological interventions are equally important and effective: The war against COVID-19 has largely been fought by people adopting and adhering to the non- pharmacological interventions or ‘the social vaccines’ of wearing a face mask, handwashing, and physical distancing. Till (and even after) effective therapies or a few vaccines become available, these interventions will continue to play a key role in decreasing the disease burden. Other than for COVID-19, there are many non-pharmacological interventions that are proven against diseases such as diabetes and hypertension: healthy diet, regular physical activity, no smoking and moderate or no use of alcohol. It is time that the approach of encouraging people to adopt a healthy behaviour becomes mainstream for other health conditions as well.

Laboratory testing and diagnostic services are an important part of overall health service delivery: Testing can help in early identification of infection, prevent the spread of disease, and guide early interventions. This is also applicable for health services in non-emergency times. Testing forms the basis for other strategies which are planned at local and national levels and must be pursued aggressively.

Better functioning government-funded health systems are more effective in an early response to epidemics and pandemics: Pandemics are unprecedented challenges and no health system is fully prepared to respond to these without additional efforts. However, stronger health systems funded by governments mount a more effective response, which also allows for surge capacity.

Health services entail teamwork between health and non- health contributors: Keeping people safe and healthy requires interventions across a broad range of services, including testing for identification of those with infection, tracing the healthy who have been exposed and are at risk of falling sick, isolating those who are sick and can transmit infection, treatment for those who need medical care, and so on. For all of these, we need not only doctors and nurses, but also pharmacists, laboratory technicians and frontline workers. We also need coordination and collaboration with sanitation workers and community members. The pandemic has taught us that to tackle health issues comprehensively we need to move out of silos. Multi-sectoral collaboration is essential for comprehensive preventive and curative health.

Frontline workers are at the heart of health services: When the history of the fight against COVID-19 is documented, the efforts of frontline workers from the ASHAs, AWWs to ANMs will find a special mention. They are the ones who have guided the health system from the field and tracked the infection in the community. They perform yeomen services even during non-pandemic periods.

The health sector faces a paucity of essential supplies needed for delivering services: The shortage of PPE in the initial stage of the outbreak and, subsequently, a shortage of medical oxygen can be taken as indicative of supply issues in the health sector in India. Although the shortage was eventually addressed, this needs to be monitored on a regular basis. These shortages are indicative of an overall shortage of various types of supplies, such as medicines, diagnostic kits and other consumables.

Other things we learnt, specified in more detail in the book are:

  • The private sector has a role to play in health services which can be harnessed with effective regulation.
  • Health sector laws and regulations should be better implemented.
  • Health and economy are interlinked.
  • There is a huge role of epidemiological, operational and scientific research in advancing health.
  • Health outcomes are dependent on collaboration and community participation.

 

Offering insights on how India continues to fight the pandemic, Till We Win is a must-read for everyone. It is a book for the people, for political leaders, policymakers and physicians, with the promise and potential to transform public health in India.

 

 

 

For Paulo Coelho, archery is the vehicle for the clear truths of life

Posted on by ashmita

Anyone who reads Paulo Coelho is changed in some fundamental way. The power of his words is rare, and the breadth of his scope is not easily matched. Here is an excerpt from his newest book The Archer, exploring truths of life through an impactful metaphor:

~

‘Tetsuya.’

The boy looked at the stranger, startled.
‘No one in this city has ever seen Tetsuya holding a bow,’ he replied. ‘Everyone here knows him as a carpenter.’

…Tetsuya made as if to resume his work: he was just putting the legs on a table.

‘A man who served as an example for a whole generation cannot just disappear as you did,’ the stranger went on. ‘I followed your teachings, I tried to respect the way of the bow, and I deserve to have you watch me shoot. If you do this, I will go away and I will never tell anyone where to find the greatest of all masters.’

The stranger drew from his bag a long bow made from varnished bamboo, with the grip slightly below center. He bowed to Tetsuya, went out into the garden, and bowed again toward a particular place. Then he took out an arrow fletched with eagle feathers, stood with his legs firmly planted on the ground, so as to have a solid base for shooting, and with one hand brought the bow in front of his face, while with the other he positioned the arrow.

The boy watched with a mixture of glee and amazement. Tetsuya had now stopped working and was observing the stranger with some curiosity.

With the arrow fixed to the bowstring, the stranger raised the bow so that it was level with the middle of his chest. He lifted it above his head and, as he slowly lowered his hands again, began to draw the string back. By the time the arrow was level with his face, the bow was fully drawn. For a moment that seemed to last an eternity, archer and bow remained utterly still. The boy was looking at the place where the arrow was pointing, but could see nothing. Suddenly, the hand on the string opened, the hand was pushed backward, the bow in the other hand described a graceful arc, and the arrow disappeared from view only to reappear in the distance.

‘Go and fetch it,’ said Tetsuya.

The boy returned with the arrow: it had pierced a cherry, which he found on the ground, forty meters away.

Tetsuya bowed to the archer, went to a corner of his workshop, and picked up what looked like a slender piece of wood, delicately curved, wrapped in a long strip of leather. He slowly unwound the leather and revealed a bow similar to the stranger’s, except that it appeared to have seen far more use.

Front cover The Archer
The Archer||Paulo Coelho

‘I have no arrows, so I’ll need to use one of yours. I will do as you ask, but you will have to keep the promise you made, never to reveal the name of the village where I live. If anyone asks you about me, say that you went to the ends of the earth trying to find me and eventually learned that I had been bitten by a snake and had died two days later.’

The stranger nodded and offered him one of his arrows.

Resting one end of the long bamboo bow against the wall and pressing down hard, Tetsuya strung the bow. Then, without a word, he set off toward the mountains.

The stranger and the boy went with him. They walked for an hour, until they reached a large crevice between two rocks through which flowed a rushing river, which could be crossed only by means of a fraying rope bridge almost on the point of collapse.

Quite calmly, Tetsuya walked to the middle of the bridge, which swayed ominously; he bowed to some- thing on the other side, loaded the bow just as the stranger had done, lifted it up, brought it back level with his chest, and fired.

The boy and the stranger saw that a ripe peach, about twenty meters away, had been pierced by the arrow.

‘You pierced a cherry, I pierced a peach,’ said Tetsuya, returning to the safety of the bank. ‘The cherry is smaller. You hit your target from a distance of forty meters, mine was half that. You should, therefore, be able to repeat what I have just done. Stand there in the middle of the bridge and do as I did.’

Terrified, the stranger made his way to the middle of the dilapidated bridge, transfixed by the sheer drop below his feet. He performed the same ritual gestures and shot at the peach tree, but the arrow sailed past.

When he returned to the bank, he was deathly pale.

‘You have skill, dignity, and posture,’ said Tetsuya. ‘You have a good grasp of technique and you have mastered the bow, but you have not mastered your mind. You know how to shoot when all the circumstances are favorable, but if you are on dangerous ground, you cannot hit the target. The archer cannot always choose the battlefield, so start your training again and be prepared for unfavorable situations. Continue in the way of the bow, for it is a whole life’s journey, but remember that a good, accurate shot is very different from one made with peace in your soul.’

The stranger made another deep bow, replaced his bow and his arrows in the long bag he carried over his shoulder, and left.

~

We can’t wait to settle in with The Archer this winter.

 

 

 

The road to scale: challenges and prescriptions for success

Posted on by penguin

From Pony to Unicorn lucidly describes the X-to-10X journey that every start-up aspiring to become a unicorn has to go through. The book effortlessly narrates the fundamental principles behind scaling. Guaranteed to make for a very interesting read, the book will be useful to entrepreneurs, leaders and investors involved in scaling start-ups. Here is an excerpt from the book From Pony To Unicorn:

 

In his epochal book, Small Is Beautiful, Ernst Friedrich Schumacher says, ‘even today, we are generally told that gigantic organizations are inescapably necessary; but when we look closely we can notice that as soon as great size has been created there is often a strenuous attempt to attain smallness within bigness.’ Big companies have tried to act small to preserve innovation. Extreme proportions, whether for a life form or an organization, is not natural. It is only in science fiction that one comes across animals the size of Godzilla. The network of blood vessels and nerves and the bone structures needed to support a life form of this size don’t exist in the real world. Even large organizations need intricate structures, speedy communication channels, an extremely strong foundation and flawless management. From time to time, a few organizations defy all odds and make it really big until a small start-up somewhere ends up disrupting them. However, the quest for scale is never-ending. One of the most enduring human pursuits throughout history has been to create things on a grand scale. Whether it was building mammoth pyramids in Egypt or connecting the mediterranean with the red sea through the Suez, or laying undersea cables across the Atlantic, the attraction for grandeur and scale has been incessant. Despite the obsessive and timeless allure of scale, the failure rate has been high. Failure to scale can be because of many reasons, some of which are quite universal and pervasive. They show up in almost every scaling scenario. An understanding of these reasons can be very helpful. It does not guarantee success but can raise the odds in favour of success appreciably. There are also unique challenges in every scaling scenario. You need to deal with these like you would deal with any ‘first time’ problem. Tolstoy’s quote from Anna Karenina is beautiful and sublime, but there are underlying nuances and variations in its meaning. It is the sheer variety and number of nuances that make universal prescriptions for success and scaling, as much as for happiness, almost impossible and often meaningless. This applies as much to start-ups as to families. The closest universal prescription for success was from Arthur Rubinstein, who once said, ‘there is no formula for success, except perhaps an unconditional acceptance of life and what it brings.’ Insights and prescriptions make sense only to individuals who recognize deeply that lessons and wisdom are meaningless in the absence of context, and there is no wisdom or prescription that can’t be challenged. However, given a clear context, an insight drawn from similar contexts can be very powerful, create those ‘Aha!’ moments and help you rapidly overcome the hurdle that is holding you back. Steve Blank, a highly respected author on entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley, in an interview with Kevin Ready published by Forbes magazine, defines a start-up as a ‘temporary organization designed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model’. Eric Ries, a successful American entrepreneur and prolific author, in his seminal book The Lean Start-up, defines a start-up as an organization that is dedicated to creating something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty. He further adds, ‘this is just as true for one person in a garage as it is for a group of seasoned professionals in a Fortune 500 boardroom. What they have in common is a mission to penetrate that fog of uncertainty to discover a successful path to a sustainable business.’

 

From Pony To Unicorn
By Sanjeev Aggarwal || T. N. Hari

This is a reasonably accurate description of what every start-up sets out to do. However, it is a bit too broad and would include many organizations, such as research laboratories and Fortune 100 companies that wouldn’t be considered start-ups. Therefore, let’s narrow this down by adding three other unambiguous filters before an organization dedicated to creating something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty can be called a start-up: a) the founder/s should still be active; b) it should be funded by venture capital (vc); and c) it should still be a private company. if these filters are applied, companies like Amazon, Google, Flipkart, Uber and Lyft would fail to qualify as start-ups, while Bigbasket, Doordash, Rubrick, Dunzo, Paytm and Swiggy would all qualify. While founder/s being active and the start-up not yet being a public company are understandable filters, the additional filter of the organization being VC-funded is relevant because that helps exclude mom-and-pop businesses that don’t have the same appetite for scaling as VC-funded start-ups.

 

Geoffrey West in his seminal book Scale, published by Penguin Press in May 2017, points out that scaling laws, whether for organizations, organisms or cities, are consequences of the optimization of network structures that sustain these various systems, resulting from the continuous feedback mechanisms inherent in natural selection and survival of the fittest. There is compelling evidence, even though there are the rare exceptions, that scaling of organizations follows certain power laws. He also points out that after growing rapidly in their youth, almost all companies end up floating on top of the ripples of the stock market with their metaphorical noses just above the surface. This is a precarious situation because they can drown in the next wave, and they are even more vulnerable if they can’t deal with the uncertainties of the markets and their own finances. While it is important to be optimistic and believe that by doing the right things your start-up could deftly navigate through the labyrinth of challenges, it is equally important to have the wisdom to understand that scale, especially extreme scale, is truly an exception and nature has stacked all the odds against it!

Raja Rao’s Gandhi – A life in words

Posted on by ashmita

In many ways, Raja Rao changed the way Mahatma Gandhi is read and written about. Get a glimpse into the processes of his writing through Makarand R. Paranjape’s introduction to Mahatma Gandhi: The Great Indian Way: 

 

In the symposium on Raja Rao on 24 March 1997, I had spoken on his forthcoming book The Great Indian Way: A Life of Mahatma Gandhi. This was a marvellous retelling of Bapu’s life in the form of a modern purana. Rao had called it ‘an experiment in honesty’, adding that the ‘Pauranic style, therefore, is the only style an Indian can use’.

The publisher was Kapil Malhotra of Vision Books, who in 1996 had published The Meaning of India. Malhotra had inherited one-half of what used to be Dina Nath Malhotra’s Hind Pocket Books, India’s first paperback imprint. Malhotra, believing in Rao’s genius, had also published The Chessmaster and His Moves in 1988. That book had won Rao the coveted Neustadt Prize. The manuscript was part of a veritable treasure trove of unpublished material that some of us, who were close to Rao, had been fortunate to be able to see. But there were many more such unpublished works, which I had seen at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, where Rao’s papers now rested.

front cover The Great Indian Way
Mahatma Gandhi: The Great Indian Way||Raja Rao

After the Chessmaster, Malhotra published On the Ganga Ghat (1989) too. It was a unique collection of short stories with the common theme and location of Varanasi. It was clear that we were in the midst of a quiet Raja Rao efflorescence. It would culminate in his being posthumously awarded India’s second-highest civilian honour, the Padma Vibhushan, in 2007, ten years after the prestigious Sahitya Akademi Fellowship mentioned earlier.

What was so special about Rao’s book, yet another of the hundreds written on Gandhi? Why had Mulk Raj Anand called it ‘Among the most authentic accounts of the Mahatma’s life and work’? It was this question that I had tried to answer in my presentation on Rao in the symposium in 1997.

The clue came from Rao himself. ‘Facts of course are there,’ he says in the preface, ‘but facts are shrill.’ Facts, in other words, do not tell the whole truth: ‘They have a way of saying more than they mean, and disbelievingly so. The silences and the symbols are omitted, and meaning taken out of breath and performance.’

What else do we have other than facts? It is, as Rao says, the ‘rasa, flavour, to makes facts melt into life’. The Indian experience is complex and multi-layered, requiring a special style to express it, even in modern times: ‘the Indian experience is such a palimpsest, layer behind layer of tradition and myth and custom go to make such an existence: gesture is ritual, and each act a statement in terms of philosophy, superstition, historical or linguistic provincialism, caste originality, or merely a personal one, and yet it’s all a whole, it’s India.’

Rao, next, makes a very bold statement: ‘Thus to face honesty against an Indian event, an Indian life, one’s expression has to be epic in style or to lie.’ Facts alone cannot tell the Indian story, nor can myths, rituals, or fables by themselves. The two must be combined in a unique manner. That was Rao’s reinvented pauranic style. Not in the manner of the old puranas, with— from the point of modern history—their unverifiable material. Nor the contemporary histories which were slaves to facts. But a unique combination of both.

This is what I called ‘seeing with three eyes’. The first eye sees only facts. The second espies the fable behind and around the fact. It is only the third eye, the eye of wisdom, that can combine both to see into the depths of things, their secret significance and meaning.

This special way of seeing is what Rao calls ‘fact against custom, history against time . . . geography against space.’ In his book on the Mahatma, this is precisely what Rao accomplishes, making ‘life larger than it seems, and its small impurities and accidents and parts, must perforce be transmuted into equations where the mighty becomes normal, and the normal in its turn becoming myth. Prose and poetry thus flow into one another, the personal and the impersonal, making the drama altogether noble and simple.’

An important feature of traditional Indian society, which persists to this very day, is its enormously rich and varied method of chronicling and celebrating life. In rural society, for instance, even humble craftspersons like weavers, potters, blacksmiths and wood workers have a specially designated bhiksha vritti jati, a group of mendicant performers, to record and disseminate their deeds. Thus, all our communities have their own jati puranas or community histories. Likewise, each village, each region, each state has its own legends, songs and stories. All these go into making up our rich narrative traditions.

Raja Rao, as he himself has often reiterated, belongs very much to this pauranic tradition. He has performed his duty as a writer as faithfully and sincerely as our ancient poets, who have told the stories of gods and demons, heroes and villains, apsaras and princesses, sages and mendicants with such zealous relish. A key and recurring figure in Raja Rao’s works is one of the greatest men of our times, Mahatma Gandhi. This book is Rao’s retelling of and tribute to Gandhi’s extraordinary life.

~

Through Mahatma Gandhi: The Great Indian Way, Raja Rao changed the rules of biography writing. The book paints a holistic and in-depth picture of a man who was larger than life.

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