by admin | May 25, 2021 | Books
By Saket Suman,
Book: Reshaping Art; Author: T.M. Krishna; Publisher: Aleph; Pages: 116; Price: Rs 399
Of all analogies that T.M. Krishna makes — freedom, abandon, beauty, embrace — in aptly titled “Reshaping Art”, catharsis comes across as the most convincing. What is art if not the purgation of the artist as an outcome of his creation? Every time an artist creates a piece of art, he takes a leap of faith — and in the process gains relief from repressed emotions.
The creation of art itself is, in many ways, associated with emotions, those that are repressed inside the artist, giving utterance to a creative desire of expressing oneself in an art form. But sometimes it can be the exact opposite; instead of the repressed emotions giving utterance to an art form, it can very well be the creative bent of mind that leads one to restrict his emotions.
But whatever the case may be, there is a certain degree of emotional relief that an artist experiences while practising his craft and this, more than anything else, is perhaps what keeps the artist so motivated in his practice. And isn’t it the same for the one experiencing it?
“When we invest every bit of ourselves in its experience,” notes Krishna, an authority on Carnatic music, “art allows us to instinctively travel within intangible, unambiguous sensuality. And when it envelops us, it can be all-consuming. A tune, an image from a poem, a mural or the frozen moment in a moving picture remains with us, enriching our lives long after that instance has passed.”
But what exactly can be termed as a work of art? Cooking, making love and gardening, as Krishna points out in the book, are often described as arts. The term art, he contends, is used in so many contexts that almost any action that gives us sensory pleasure is deemed to be a work of art.
“While many human acts can be beautiful, pleasurable and can fulfill sensory needs, they do not fall into the category of art forms. Some people walk with grace and present themselves with finesse. This requires a great deal of care and taste. While their appearance might be pleasing and most likely result in us gravitating towards them, they can’t be considered art objects,” Krishna maintains in the book.
He further points out that there is one more “essential element” that leads us to use the term “art” for many human actions: “the inexplicable difference in the end result when two people use exactly the same empirically valued components to create something.”
He gives the example of cooking to prove his point. “With identical ingredients, one chef’s dish is spectacular but another’s is just above average.” But that’s not all, there’s something more to the character of art, he says.
“Art is not an accident; it does not happen by mistake. It is a deliberate, conscious act of creating an art object; it is a willed human endeavour. Art does not depend on a general acceptance of attractiveness. In fact subjective notions of beauty are entirely secondary to the act of art creation,” he contends.
The book at hand is a novella-length nonfiction title that explores the various aspects of art, its essence, its relation with the society at large — and with caste, gender and oppression, in particular, along with contemplative chapters on its spirit and its presence inside the classroom. At the same time, contained as it is in just over a hundred pages, “Reshaping Art” is also a very compact book where more has to be read between the lines and interpreted than what the writer has actually penned in the offering.
Now again, the interpretations may vary as per the tastes or inclinations or the state of mind that the reader is in when he flicks through these pages, but the liberty to interpret a given artwork in a myriad of ways comes naturally to the one experiencing it. And writing too is an art form, as dear to its creator as a painting is to the painter or music to the musician.
Krishna’s book is a contemplation, a meditation, an attempt to understand the essence of “freedom, abandon, beauty, catharsis and embrace” — all that he relates art to, and therefore it cannot be read, it can only be explored. Indeed, there’s much more than meets the eye in this particular offering. Read it slowly, again and again.
(Saket Suman can be contacted at saket.s@ians.in)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Books, Muslim World
By Vikas Datta,
Title: Pakistan under Siege: Extremism, Society, and the State; Author: Madiha Afzal; Publisher: Viking/Penguin Random House India; Pages: 208; Price: Rs 599
It is considered one of the world’s most dangerous countries for being a hub of a particularly virulent form of violent religious extremism, whose impact ranges far beyond the neighbourhood – and is also bleeding the nation itself. But this view of Pakistan ignores how it got to this state and how engrained is the problem among its people.
In other words, are all ordinary Pakistani extremists?
No, argues US-based Pakistani academician Madiha Afzal, and in this book, goes on to provide a reasoned, insightful and multi-facetted analysis of how most common Pakistanis think – and why.
While Pakistan is, in Western eyes, a “villainous, failing state that created a terrorism monster and does not do enough to fight it” and its citizens “thought to be irrational fundamentalists”, she says the exclusive definition of the country only from its terrorism problem, by jihadist training camps and involvement of some citizens in attacks in the West is a misleading simplification of a “more complex story”.
And since most works examining fundamentalism in the country tends to look at it from a “top-down security perspective, limited to the actions of the state with little focus on how those actions affect the ordinary Pakistani” and ignoring the historical basis of such actions, they also gives “a one-dimensional picture”, says the author.
It is these perceptions, as well as the oft-believed view that Pakistan’s travails arose from its major involvement in the campaign against the Soviets in Afghanistan, that she seeks to clarify, elaborate or refute here.
And for this purpose, Afzal, a non-resident fellow at the Brookings Institution, adjunct Associate Professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and World Bank consultant, uses a combined approach of survey data on various issues stretching from terrorism to religion, personal interviews with students, from high school to university, historical narratives of a variety of key players and her own understanding of the country’s course to show how extremism worked its inroads right from the formation of Pakistan.
As she shows, with a focus of the rhetoric and strategic choices/decisions of the three main actors – the armed forces, the politicians and the Islamist parties, the period of Gen Zia-ul-Haq was much responsible for the current malaise but the roots of the problem extend much deeper.
These, Afzal contends, arose not only in the circumstances Pakistan was born and faced, but in rather the two main concepts it chose in its national narrative – Islam and active suspicion of India (and later the West) – and accordingly spread among the people as a doctrine.
Beginning with “a (very) brief” introduction to four major militant groups – the Taliban’s Pakistani and Afghan versions, the Lashkar-e-Taiba and the Al Qaeda, and how the public perceives them, she goes on to encapsulate the people’s views on these terror outfits, as well as the US, India and Islam itself.
Subsequently, she goes to deal with the Pakistani state’s narrative on the terrorism it faces, and back to its own creation, its Afghan and Kashmir ‘jihads’, and the civil-military equation, to give a rather eye-opening idea of how the whole problem arose.
Afzal then takes then Punjab Governor Salman Taseer’s 2011 murder by his own bodyguard over his stand on blasphemy laws to go back and study the legal Islamization. This, as we come to learn, though speeded-up in the Zia years, began right from the country’s birth, and accounts for the rather uncompromisingly fundamentalist outlook among a broad swathe of its people.
Next is the educational component, especially the Pakistan Studies course, in firming up the mindset of the people, especially regarding their country and religion and its inveterate enemies (India and the US), and the contested issue of the madrassas. Afzal ends with her overall appraisal.
Apart from the heartening point that its not the people, its the state that holds responsibility for this state of affairs, she offers a hard and long, but possible, path towards redemption.
But while Afzal’s book, packed with a host of valuable, sometimes even counter-intuitive, insights about the Pakistani people is an essential contribution to understanding the country, its real worth is in identifying the mistakes – an exclusivist approach to religion, ignoring “inconvenient” history and trying to indoctrinate people – that Pakistan has committed and guard against following them.
(Vikas Datta can be contacted at vikas.d@ians.in)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Books
By Gokul Bhagabati,
Title: AI and Analytics: Accelerating Business Decisions; Author: Sameer Dhanrajani; Publisher: Wiley; Pages: 372; Price: 599
Analytics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) — concepts that seemed to be lofty ideals not so long ago — have suddenly started sounding all too familiar thanks to their widespread use by some of the world’s biggest internet companies. But these technologies won’t remain a fiefdom of a few. Nor should they, argues a powerful new book.
On the face of it, only a few tech giants like Google, Apple, Facebook or Amazon seem to be ready to maximise the adoption of analytics and AI and reap their benefits.
For example, anyone using Gmail would know how Google has used analytics to sort emails in different categories to help its users get to the important messages fast. Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri or Google’s Assistant that can now perform a wide variety of tasks using AI – from setting up alarms to playing songs — hardly need any introduction.
But Sameer Dhanrajani, in his book “AI and Analytics: Accelerating Business Decisions”, argues that not many companies — especially those that are neither in the e-commerce business, nor strictly tech companies — have been successful in adopting these technologies.
In other words, only a few companies have been able to make use of these technologies to give their organisations a sustainable competitive advantage over their competitors. And this is despite the fact that most companies now realise that adopting analytics and AI is a must to stay afloat in the future.
Dhanrajani, who has a rich experience of building AI and Analytics businesses for a number of organisations, including Cognizant Technology Solutions, knows that these companies need guidance, and most of all encouragement, in utilising the data stored in silos of their organisations through analytics and AI.
Dhanrajani has been helping these businesses approach the problem with practical insights for quite some time now with his blogs and lectures at business conferences, and his latest book is also a step in the same direction.
The book is divided into two parts. The first part details what businesses, including start-ups with budget constraints, need to do to transform their businesses with AI and analytics.
Most importantly, Dhanrajani explains that lack of understanding of the meaning of analytics, a talent crunch, and a view that it is an expensive, esoteric subject may emerge as stumbling blocks in implementation of these technologies.
He offers strategies to enterprises to overcome these hindrances while laying out a roadmap for them in implementing these technologies to make their organisations smarter by increasing operational efficiencies and improving customer relationship management, while reducing risks arising out of internal decisions and external threats.
For, Dhanrajani believes that analytics has the ability to combine data from numerous data sources in interesting ways and offer deep insights into the impact of business decisions.
What makes the book an interesting read is that the author’s recommendations are nicely punctuated with examples of specific initiatives that have helped some of the world’s well-known enterprises leverage these technologies.
The second part of the book provides details about the transformations brought about by AI and analytics for multiple industries – banking and insurance, healthcare and life sciences, retail and consumer packaged goods.
In this part, the author also devotes a separate section to the relevance of AI and analytics in autonomous vehicles, Internet of Things (IoT), chatbots, implementation of blockchain technology, and in beating cyberattacks.
It is not without any reason that Dhanrajani wants to help all organisations embrace the AI and analytics. First, unlike many thinkers, Dhanrajani does not believe that AI would become an existential threat to humanity. According to him, humans and AI will co-exist in the future as humans will be sensitive enough to create contingencies to ensure that autonomous machines do not harm us.
He also believes that the world is on the verge of having a data-driven economy where AI and analytics would be the driving force of success for most organisations.
Reading this book may not guarantee successful implementation of AI and analytics in an organisation, but it may encourage many to take the right steps. And who knows, it may help some to say hello to the future with greater confidence.
The title and small fonts used in the text may give some readers the impression that reading this book would be one tough row to hoe. Far from it, the small chapters and the easy narrative make reading it a pleasant experience, and also quite enlightening.
(Gokul Bhagabati can be contacted at gokul.b@ians.in)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Books
By Vikas Datta,
Title: The Written World – How Literature Shaped History; Author: Martin Puchner; Publisher: Granta Books; Pages: 433; Price: Rs 699
In that splendid comedy “Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines”, set in the age when humans had just began to take to the skies, a Prussian Colonel tells a wary subordinate tasked to fly a plane that he should follow the procedure for learning everything they do “from the book of instructions”. The operative word here is “book”.
But books, which now span and recount every conceivable aspect of the human condition and endeavour, wouldn’t have come into existence without the literature, or the “foundational texts” — religious, cultural and political–‘that they were developed to present, preserve and propagate, argues American academician Martin Puchner here.
And it is not only in our present, technology-suffused era that we have ignored the value of literature.
But before he tells us what it has done for us, involving trips through at least four continents, from along with Alexander the Great’s armies to the popular storytellers in the marketplaces of the medieval Middle East and the courts of feudal Japan to a popular contemporary literary fest in India’s Jaipur, he seeks to tell us what would happen if literature didn’t exist.
In such a world, Puchner, a professor of Drama and English and Comparative Literature at Harvard, says bookstores and libraries would be quite empty, the publishing industry and Amazon would be different, and he — and many of us — would have nothing on our bedside tables for night-time when we can’t sleep.
But while this will be “unfortunate”, he argues such a situation “barely scratches the surface of what would be lost” if literature had never existed and stories had remained oral.
“Such a world is almost impossible for us to imagine. Our sense of history, of the rise and fall of empires and nations, would be completely different. Most philosophical and political ideas would never have come into existence, because the literature that gave rise to them wouldn’t have been written. Almost all religious beliefs would disappear along with the scriptures in which they were expressed.”
Stressing literature isn’t only for book lovers, Puchner contends that since it emerged four millennia ago, “it has shaped the lives of most humans on planet Earth”.
And in this book, he shows us how as stories and preachings intersect with writing and writing technologies across the world in different ages, and affect their societies from ancient Mesopotamia, China and India to the jungle civilisations of Central America to the sandy expanses of Mali in the early modern world, down to more recent times, spanning the Communist Manifesto to the Harry Potter saga.
In his tale, which begins with the American astronauts on Apollo 8 addressing the world after orbiting the moon and becoming the first humans to see its far side from the Bible’s Book of Genesis, Puchner contends the growth of literature passed through four stages.
First, the development of the alphabet to represent speech, but the knowledge remained confined to small groups of scribes. Second, the rise of “charismatic teachers” such as the Buddha, Socrates, Confucius and Jesus, who stressed on the spoken word but became influential when their words were spread through text. Third, the individual authors supported by innovations that made access to writing easier, which were succeeded by the times of mass production and mass literacy.
Puchner acquaints us with these stages, juxtapositioned with the revolutions in writing and printing technologies that radically transformed literature, not only in how it spread and was read but also how it is written as authors adjust to new circumstances, and a range of representative works — the Epic of Gilgamesh, Don Quixote, The Arabian Nights, the Tale of Genji, the Mayan ‘Popol Vuh’ to Derek Walcott’s poetry.
And wherever possible, he supplements his rousing narrative with a range of singular characters beyond authors — and the role of women, both as writers and narrators within the story — and accounts of his own “field visits” to the areas in question.
Puchner’s choice may be subjective and his manner breezy and a bit hurried — especially in the final few chapters — but such is the breadth of erudition and fascinating tidbits he features that literary aficionados will treat this as a vindication of their stand.
For the others, it may prove to be an eye-opener.
(Vikas Datta can be contacted at vikas.d@ians.in)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Books, Markets, Technology
By Saket Suman,
Book: The Fuzzy and the Techie; Author: Scott Hartley; Publisher: Penguin; Price: Rs 599; Pages: 301
There are two very common terms used at Stanford University — “Fuzzy”, for students of the humanities and social sciences; and “Techie”, for students of engineering and hard sciences. Now, in a new book “The Fuzzy and the Techie”, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist argues that this informal division has misled the business world for decades.
The book sets out to argue that the liberal arts will rule the digital world and its author Hartley, who has worked for Google, Facebook, Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Centre for Internet and Society, and the White House as a Presidential Innovation Fellow, presents a ringside view of the digital world, arguing why the rise of tech has to be supplemented with knowledge of the liberal arts. In doing so, Hartley also reminds readers that liberal arts are called so not because they focus on subjects that are necessarily liberal, or artistic, but, in his own words, because each student is required to study a broad set of subjects prior to specialisation in a given field.
In fact, the word comes from the Latin “artes liberales”, and is used to denote disciplines such as music, geometry and philosophy. These diverse subjects, according to Hartley, can together stretch the mind in different directions and, in the process, make it seamlessly free to think and to observe or to plan and to execute.
“Each of these subjects is meant to broaden the students, force them to think critically, to debate, and to grapple with ambiguities inherent in subjects like philosophy. They are also meant to help the student cultivate empathy for others in subjects such as literature. In short, they are less focussed on specific job preparation than they are about the cultivation of a well-rounded human being,” Hartley elaborates.
However, notwithstanding all arguments in favour of the liberal arts, there has been a decades-old bid to keep liberal arts away from students who write code and develop software. This, according to the author, has created a false dichotomy between those who are versed in the classical liberal arts, and those with the requisite vocational skills to succeed in “tomorrow’s technology-led economy”.
The author has spent a year working at Google India and a lot of what he deals with in the book also comes from his groundwork and observations here. He explains that right from the “earliest exam standards that determine whether or not students move towards or away from engineering”, the policy is such that the two streams of liberal arts and hard sciences are separated rather than fostering an understanding between the two.
“Whether a student sits for the Joint Entrance Exam (JEE) for admission to an Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), for the Birla Institute of Technology and Science Examination Test (BITSAT), the VIT Engineering Entrance Exam for a coveted Engineering seat at Vellore Institute of Technology or for a regional common examination in Maharashtra, Karnataka or West Bengal, students are quickly funnelled down very specific predetermined paths, and are perhaps less able to explore their own passions or values,” maintains the author.
The fundamental argument the book makes is that in our fast-evolving technological world, it is very crucial to make these technologies accessible and democratic. In this regard, the author believes that the timeless questions of the liberal arts have become essential requirements of our new technological instruments.
“While those fabled graduates of the Indian Institutes of Technology or of the great engineering academies such as Manipal, develop critical skills and retain steadfast importance in laying the technological infrastructure, most successful start-ups require great industry context, psychology in understanding user-needs and wants, intuitive designs, and adept communication and collaboration skills. These are the very skill-sets our graduates in literature, philosophy and the social sciences provide. These are not separate or add-on skills, but the imperative components alongside any technological literacy,” argues Hartley.
The author further shares stories from his personal life and reflects upon the fact that, in the end, it has always been overall knowledge and understanding that has led him to make the right decisions, rather than specialisation in a given field.
“Peering behind the veil of our greatest technology, it is often our greatest humanity that makes it whole,” he contends. The book carries a foreword by S.D. Shibulal, co-founder and former CEO of Infosys, and has been elaborately backnoted with a 50-page Notes section.
(Saket Suman can be contacted at saket.s@ians.in)
—IANS
