by admin | May 25, 2021 | Books
By Vikas Datta,
Title: The Beautiful Poetry of Donald Trump; Author (compiler): Rob Sears; Publisher: Canongate Books; Pages: 144; Price: Rs 699
What can we make of Donald Trump? While history will be the ultimate judge of his presidency, despite all the ominous signs, attempts to be articulate, and gaffes so far, he may claim (with some unsolicited help) to challenge illustrious predecessors — eloquent Abraham Lincoln, highly articulate John F. Kennedy and restless polymath Theodore Roosevelt — on the literary level.
Forget Trump’s ceaseless exhibitions of misogyny and xenophobia or complaints of victimisation and targeting by most media, his crude, personal attacks on opponents or critics, the inexplicable coinages (“covfefe”), for there is a “sensitive, poetic side” to this President of the United States as expressed in his words over the years. Especially in his bid to win the White House, his victory and his tenure.
Trump himself may never have realised this ability nor would have we — but now we know.
“It is a little known alternative fact that the 45th President, Donald J. Trump, is a remarkable poet. This book aims to redress this oversight on the part of the literary world, and showcase his finest and most revealing words in a previously unknown form.
“While discoursing on politics, walls, gender issues or his own excellent genes, Trump’s poems are nothing if not beautiful. Terrific, in fact. Amazing…” says Rob Sears, who has compiled five dozen-odd of his “poems”.
Wonder why this Trump skill was not known so far? Well, for one, these are not conscious poems by Trump, but a deft repackaging of his tweets, public statements, his reality show dialogues, and sentences from his correspondence to make poetry.
Take “All I Ask is Fairness”: “People are constantly attacking my hair/I think it’s very unfair/Obama said he never met his uncle, Oscar/Imagine if I made that statement/It would be the electric chair”.
Or “I am the best”, which goes: “I predicted Apple’s stock would fall/I will build a great, great wall/I build buildings that are 94 stories tall/My hands – are they small?” and then “Slowly the hair dries” – which has just one line: “It’s a process that can take 18 months to two years”.
Behind this uproarious but revealing venture is Sears, a writer of fiction and comedy for American not-for-profit publishing concern McSweeney and Amazon’s Audible, who very tongue-in-cheek contends that they “reveal a sensitive and shyly artistic side to Trump that may prompt a reappraisal of the man even among his critics”.
Relying on the Trump Twitter Archive, the Trump Archive and American Presidency Project to collect tweets, including those long-deleted, and quotes, also from the pre-internet era, Sears has fashioned a remarkable range of verse detailing Trump’s views on various issues — more trenchantly, on his opponents in the race for the presidency.
And he uses a variety of styles, be it the sonnet, the quatrain (as shown above), the couplet (as in “I am open-minded” which goes “I use both iPhone and Samsung/A great leader has to be flexible”) and even the haiku for the purpose.
The haiku is best used for attacking opponents, be it Republican rival Jeb Bush (“Low energy ‘stiff’/Said he would take his pants off/He wants to look cool”) or anchor Megyn Kelly, Senators John McCain and Elizabeth Warren but also — rarely — to praise, especially Russian President Vladimir Putin.
But the slightly longer ones, dealing with his pet peeves (“Very dishonest media”), stand out on their own, and show both Trump’s mindset and Sears’ creativity and expansive efforts. Take “I make this promise” — which starts with his presidential oath, then a 2015 tweet mocking John Kerry, a 1999 remark on Larry King Live, a 2012 attack on Cher, and ends with his closing words at a 2015 rally in South Carolina.
Sears, who identifies the origins of the remarks — tweets, speeches, etc on a facing page, also contributes a foreword that is not only a masterly exposition of Trump’s “poetic skills” but of his psyche — and the epitome of satire.
This is not the first work to use poetry to lampoon Trump, but among the best to use his own words for the purpose. And where reason crumbles before resentment, ridicule may be the only hope.
(Vikas Datta can be contacted at vikas.d@ians.in)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Books
By Vikas Datta,
Title: What Would Freud Do?; Author: Sarah Tomley; Publisher: Cassell Illustrated/Hachette UK; Pages: 193; Price: Rs 499
Anyone who goes to a psychiatrist ought to have his head examined, American film producer Samuel Goldwyn once said, but this simple view of psychology as dealing with mental afflictions is too confining. For, as a study of “thinking animals” that humans are, it can ascertain motives, behaviour and personality traits to explain, among others, our procrastination, our mean bosses or why we remain brand loyal.
While also trying to answer eternal queries about why we can’t find Mr/Ms Right, or “why does it always happen to me”, it also keeps up with changing trends to go on to detect what lies behind some phenomenon of the new digital world — such as why some of us can’t lift our gaze from our phones, social media rejection and the success of Harry Potter.
And this psychology does despite developing on two divergent axes, based on its practitioners treating it as an art or a science and consequently using varying approaches and techniques. Thus, psychotherapist and writer Sarah Tomley first seeks to describe these different forms of “psychology”.
This divergence, she says, stems from its “two fathers” — a German scientist and a celebrated American philosopher — who oversaw, respectively, psychology as a quantifiable discipline academically (as opposed to the over-arching general definition) and psychotherapy (more abstract and speculative).
But though the two see themselves very differently “don’t always view each another with absolute respect”, the procedural differences do not affect the purpose of studying and understanding human mental conditions.
And in this book, Tomley goes on to show “how the theories of some of the world’s leading psychotherapists, psychoanalysts and psychologists can be applied to everyday problems” of all times, roping in 80 prominent figures from Sigmund Freud to Erich Fromm, and from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi of the “flow” fame to Daniel Kahneman, known for his work on decision-making and judgement.
Dividing her work into five sections, each dealing with various relevant questions about us personally and socially, she uses the question-answer format to show how psychotherapists, psychoanalysts and psychologists have already grappled with their basic underlying problems and the theories framed in response.
In the first section, “What am I like?” — where Tomley deals with issues such as procrastination, the thin line between being a “caring person” or a “doormat”, or between banter that is welcome or hurtful — she takes recourse to Freud’s postulate of the id, ego and superego to deal with temptation, couched in the question: “I know I shouldn’t — but could you pass that last piece of cake?”
“Why am I acting like this?”, the second and most expansive section, addresses issues like addiction to cell-phones (which many will be rather mortified to learn is not only a problem but several of them) and TV soaps, lack of concentration, “road rage” (caused by the brain’s “Rage circuit” as well as “fast and slow thinking”), necessary evasions of truth — as in “Why do I lie when she says ‘Does my butt look big in this?” phobias, and so on.
The third — “Other people” — goes into the vexed matters of finding the ideal partner/soulmate, controlling teenagers, overt inexplicable friendliness (where Herr Doktor Freud weighs in), intentions of affairs despite a great and understanding partner, mean bosses (explained through the medium of Carl Gustav Jung’s “Shadow archetype”, Wilfred Bion’s “group dynamics” and Rene Girard’s “scapegoating”).
The penultimate “What’s happening?” tackles “Why do I keep saying embarrassing things/buy the more expensive option”, motives, final intentions, Harry Potter (explained by Jung’s “archetypes” and collective memory hypothesis), and then the final chapter, “How can I improve myself?”, looks at losing weight, career shifts, and creative thinking.
But despite all this, Tomley’s work is not a self-help book but more of a primer on various strands of psychological thought and their applications brought to bear on discerning the primary elements of what we deem our problems/issues. And ultimately, we find they stem from within us — our brain dictating how we think or react to something. And thus this is more of a travelogue than a map.
(Vikas Datta can be contacted at vikas.d@ians.in)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Books
By Vikas Datta,
Title: The People Next Door — The Curious History of India-Pakistan Relations; Author: T.C.A. Raghavan; Publisher: HarperCollins ; Pages: 361; Price: Rs 699
Shifting from cordial and promising to suspicious and hostile (and back again), regularly overshadowed by history, ideology and perceptions, prone to public posturing but also quiet, behind-the-scenes pragmatism, Indian-Pakistan relations possess their own unique and complex logic, which even the eminent political scientist Hans Morgenthau would find hard to explain.
And these relations can have wide ramifications and resonances — both in high international politics but also domestic, as we learn in this book. The first was seen during the 1965 war, which also left two Southeast Asian nations engaged in their own spat, or in 1971, when two leading Communist powers virulently assailed each other at the UN Security Council.
A good example of the second was how the decision of Indira Gandhi to accept the mandate against her in the 1977 (post-Emergency) general elections was seen in Pakistan — which had its own share of political upheavals that year. A small aside was Mrs Gandhi’s tart response to a Pakistani dignitary’s invitation to visit — but actually aimed at then Foreign Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who was sitting on the other side.
Beyond these, the Partition, Kashmir, river water sharing, terrorism, the nuclear arms race and many other facets, including cooperation, make India-Pakistan ties cover a large and complex canvas, painted and repainted over for seven decades, leaving those well-versed at one point not as adept later.
But the attempt to decipher it has to be made with the latest effort by former Indian High Commissioner to Pakistan T.C.A. Raghavan, who admits it is not a very easy task since “every facet of the relationship has over the decades been scrutinised and commented upon in detail…” and public knowledge is “considerable”.
Asking “how much more can possibly be written about a relationship which has been bad in the most conceivable ways” since the countries came into being, Raghavan, who had two tours of duty in Pakistan, notes that his own experiences “had been marked by a near-constant discovery of something new about the past”.
These, he clarifies, are not “new” facts but a new look at events and their connections, which gives a more nuanced and more rounded perspective to the course of ties to “impart a fuller sense of how and why things developed as they did”.
This approach and its considerable scholarship, manifested in both wide ranging and absorbing minutiae, is what makes the book a usefully incisive and informative addition to the considerable literature, of all kinds and approaches, already available.
Raghavan, who begins with showing how issues that would bedevil relations down the years came within roughly a year of Independence/Partition, also dwells here on some lesser-known/understood matters such as the first water crisis and the issue of Kalat (expanding to entire Balochistan down the ages).
Alongside, there is the curious case of Rahmat Ali, who coined the name “Pakistan” but found no place in it, three case studies of “Muslims who would, in the the normal course, have been the pillars of the new Pakistan but moved in the opposite direction”, and largely unknown cases of cooperation between the two nations even as conflict was raging in Kashmir.
And then there are nuggets of interesting trivia like a master criminal who fled to Pakistan and whose extradition India unsuccessfully demanded (hint: it was not Dawood Ibrahim)
Raghavan, who follows a chronological approach, also stresses that instead of trying to be “exhaustive”, he aims at bringing a “fuller flavour” in a “more subjective and selective view of both well- and lesser-known incidents and individuals in a broad context of the principal ups and downs of the relationship”.
And towards this, he draws upon not only diplomats and politicians, but also journalists, activists and others to provide a new perspective on prominent milestones, but also the promise in the late 1950s-60s, in the short Rajiv Gandhi-Benazir Bhutto era, the early Musharraf years, et al.
Even those who think they know all, will find some new perspective in a book which, the author notes, deals with “history”, not “policy”.
Even as he confesses to an Indian perspective of a “divisive and deeply contested past and present” – Raghavan showcases how, here, it is not what happened, but what is perceived to have happened — and remembered — that is the key.
It is this legacy we need to understand and overcome for a better future.
(Vikas Datta can be contacted at vikas.d@ians.in)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Books
By Vikas Datta,
Title: The Romanovs; Author: Simon Sebag Montefiore; Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson; Pages: 736; Price: Rs 699
They came to power through blood and suffering and bowed out in blood and upheaval. But in the over three centuries that they ruled, their medium-sized realm on Europe’s far fringes rose to become a multi-continental power that influenced — and still does — the course of developments far beyond its borders and whose governance continues to bear their stamp.
Taking over a war-ruined principality, the Romanovs ended up with dominion over a sixth of the world’s land over three continents — the third-greatest empire ever after the British and the Mongols, though the second by contiguous territory — accumulated painstakingly over centuries. And then they lost it irretrievably within about a decade, following reverses in war and revolution fuelled by repression.
How they achieved both these feats is engagingly and masterfully told here by acclaimed British historian Simon Sebag Montefiore.
But why should we focus on the Romanovs, as even the Bolsheviks, who stormed to power after them, are gone too? This is because their story, he says, is “also a portrait of absolutism in Russia — and whatever else one believes about Russia, its culture, its soul, its essence have been exceptional, a singular nature which one family aspired to personify.”
Montefiore, who has biographies of a prominent representative of the dynasty and Stalin to his credit, among others, combines rigorous research and inspired story-telling to present the colourful (and sometimes dark) pageant of the dynasty’s tsars and tsarinas — some enlightened and some despotic (or both), some touched by genius and some by madness or sadism or a raging sex drive, but all autocratic, ambitious and decadent.
Along with them are the others who defined the course of their rule — the religious patriarchs, administrators, diplomats, explorers, generals, police and spy chiefs, courtesans, as well as hostile foreign potentates, rebellious subjects and other disgruntled elements (including family) in a whirlwind of debauched excesses, conspiracy and coups, assassinations and torture, and wars and revolutions.
And the record of Romanovs, as Montefiore shows, bears testimony to Alexander Pushkin’s observation (in “Boris Godunov”): “Heavy is the cap of Monomakh” — referring to the headgear of the Prince of Kievan Rus, the forerunner of the Russian state.
This is exemplified, as he goes on to recount, with the dynasty’s founder — Michael I, a 16-year-old who wept when a delegation came to offer him the crown in 1613 — to its last ruler, Nicholas II, who was also reluctant to rule, and went on to meet a tragic fate along with his wife and children in a dark, dank house basement far from his glittering palaces in 1918.
But the Romanovs were never only marked by their male members, be it larger than life figures like the towering Peter the Great (1682-1725), for their women did not merely exercise influence behind-the-scenes or as regents for minor sons, but as rulers too. Most of the 18th century after Peter saw the rule of four empresses, who out-manoeuvred, ousted or even eliminated their male co-rulers/consorts.
Montefiore also dwells amply on them — not only Catherine II (1762-96), the second after Peter to be called “the Great” and as key as him in extending territorial expanse — but also her earlier namesake Catherine I (1725-27), Anna (1730-41) and Elizabeth (1741-62).
But what keeps his account from becoming a mere tale of rulers, battles and other historical facts is his eclectic approach, and vividly colourful and relatable turns of phrase.
Take Peter the Great, who takes up quite a bit with his literal hands-on approach to strengthening and modernising his realm. Along with him feature his grotesque “All-Mad All-Jesting All-Drunken Synod”, a “half military headquarters and half drunken carnival” with its obscene religious titles (“Archdeacon F***-off”). Montefiore describes him as seeming “like a terrifying circus master presiding over a seventeenth-century version of a decadent rock band on tour”.
Others get the same treatment.
History at its most entertainingly lurid yet incisively instructive, Montefiore’s tome is also an apt reminder that the past continues to influence the present, whatever be the differences in form or ideology and we only forget or ignore it at our peril.
(Vikas Datta can be contacted at vikas.d@ians.in)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Books
By Vikas Datta,
Title: A Legacy of Spies; Author: John le Carre; Publisher: Penguin Random House UK; Pages: 320; Price: Rs 599
Old soldiers never die but fade away but what about spies? Do they live in the same secretive anonymity of their careers or dread the spooks’ curse: “May I read about you in the papers” coming true as archives open, revelations pour out and a new regime oblivious of earlier conditions or their contributions is in charge.
It is the latter fear that strikes long retired British spy as he is suddenly summoned from his uneventful retired life in the remote French countryside to London by his former service for a matter which might be a bit urgent.
The message to Peter Guillam, the trusted right-hand man of George Smiley of the “Circus” (as Le Carre termed the MI6), says that a matter in which he appears to “have played a significant role some years back has unexpectedly raised its head” and they need him to help them respond to it. And the bland message has also subtle but unmistakable threat too.
And as he goes to meet the service’s current legal adviser and a woman from the historical section, he finds himself stumped to be confronted with something he fervently wished was forgotten – Operation Windfall. “Does an easing of the soul take place when you realize your worst expectations have been fulfilled? Not in my case”.
For this, longtime Carre fans and followers might recall, was what formed the basis of his iconic “The Spy Who Came in from the Cold” (1963). And even half a century after it, the spy-turned-writer, now 85, proves he has lost none of his powers as he provides the definite closure to the story that propelled him to enduring fame with its prequel and sequel here.
As is Le Carre’s wont, the story begins midway in the unforgiving present, where Guillam, who played a small role in “The Spy Who..” but came into his own with “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy”, is asked to come clean on this disaster which ended with the death of British spy Alec Leamas and his innocent girlfriend Liz Gold on the newly-constructed Berlin Wall.
For Guillam is told that it turns out that both Leamas and Gold had children who are determined to raise the issue in the parliament, press and courts for the wanton death of their parents but the service cannot do much as it turns out most of the files on this particular operation are missing.
This leads to Guillam recollecting the story of the eventful story of what was behind Leamas’ mission – and what the aftermath was, though being careful to avoid telling his interlocutors more than what he needs to, despite all their pressure and inducements. Instead he plays for time, stonewalling as much as he can before making gradual concessions.
There are also a couple of encounters with Leamas’ son, who offers him a “bargain deal” for dropping the matter. But it only ends when Guillam takes matters into his own hands and contacts another old operative, who tells him how to get in touch with Smiley. And it is the old fox, who finally makes his appearance in the final few pages – well worth the wait – who settles everything.
Filled with the minutiae of espionage techniques and purposes, the back-biting and cliques and the fragile nerves of spies, operatives and helpers, Le Carre’s latest work is again a taut account of the amorality, split-section decisions and deception this line of business requires in its successful practitioners.
It also places “The Spy Who Came..” in a more bleak context that it was, as well as revealing the fate of many old characters never seen in subsequent works including Smiley’s long term-adversary Karla and the supposed beneficiary of the Operation Windfall among others.
And it also shows how even effective spies, how much they conceal or suppress it, can never totally subdue their conscience. As Guillam observes in the beginning, “a professional intelligence officer is no more immune to human feelings than the rest of mankind”, and in the end: “How much of our human feeling can we dispense with in the name of freedom…”
That is the question that Le Carre always raises – and never loses its importance.
(Vikas Datta can be contacted at vikas.d@ians.in)
—IANS
