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Five Back-To-Back Reads During Lockdown That Have Challenged Personal Prejudices, Biases And Existing Belief Systems

When the nationwide, 21-day lockdown was announced, the first three things that had to be done were: buying necessary provisions for three to seven days ensuring that I need not step out every other day, checking if all the cooking equipment were functionally well enough and did not need make-overs, and oddly enough, reorganize the book-shelf and identify some books — soft and hard copies — to devour.

Provisions did not last beyond a week and had to be repurchased, as even the biggest supermarkets started rationing quantities of purchases (sensibly enough) per customer.

Some of the cutlery equipment have screwed up during the course of the lockdown — (i) the induction stove got short-circuited, thanks to the power fluctuations that happened as an aftermath of the diya-lighting ‘ceremony’, and we had to almost break open one of our friends’ homes (he has comfortably perched himself at his hometown even before the lockdown was enforced) to grab his artillery. (ii) That ill-fated induction stove had not been used for quite some time, and hence the ceramic plate at the top (where vessels are to be kept) developed cracks due to the sudden, continuous drudgery it was forced into; it has ever since been used in a mellow, soothing manner (read, reduced temperature) so as to not complicate things further. (iii) The pressure cooker’s gasket could not hold steam properly since the rubber had become too slack to hold back steam, and a new one had to be bought (thankfully, this happened during the extended phase of lockdown, and hence some shops selling cutlery essentials were open).

The third aspect — reorganizing the book shelves and deciding on some of the books to be read — is the best thing that seems to have paid off big time. Five books in particular were very impactful for several reasons. All of them were recommendations from three people, as I do not have the expertise in choosing books to read in English.

• Sun Tzu on The Art of War

A small book spanning 43 pages, containing a list of instructions/strategies — Commandments of sorts — which, if followed promptly, would provide a decisive victory in a battle. That is where a lot of parallels to the current world scenarios start playing out. One could imagine Prashant Kishor reading it and assimilating ‘The Art of Winning Elections’ in a modern ‘democracy’, or Jeff Bezos reading it as ‘The Art of Monopoly’.

There are no moral or ethical grounds discussed; the only goal is victory by crushing the opponent, capitalizing on every strength of the self and weakness of the opponent. If you are used to referring dark prophecies as Orwellian, you will definitely rethink on alluding them to Sun Tzu (by calling it Tzuian, maybe). The first excerpt that immediately struck a chord, amidst the communal labelling during the lockdown, was “He will win whose army is animated by the same spirit throughout all its ranks”. I am not going to delve deep into the politics of which party this alludes to in the present circumstances, but this book is a gem everybody should read.

• Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus — John Gray

When I started reading this, I was completely skeptical about the content, thinking it would be just yet another self-help book giving a series of ‘tried-and-tested methods’ for a relationship to sustain in the long run. What I found myself in was an interesting deep-dive into the psyche of men and women in general, and why these differences create conflict in opposite-gender relationships.

Two things definitely stand out for me from the book (and I am sure different people who read the book are going to take different things away from it). The first is the allusion of behavior of men in relationship, to rubber bands (men can stretch to zones of loneliness until a point, and when that tipping point is reached, the rubber band comes back to its original position — towards their partner — fairly quickly and more vigorously than before), and women, to waves (there are emotional highs and lows like a sinusoidal curve, and it is important to treat both the crests and troughs with the knowledge that the successive phase is lurking around the corner).

The second interesting takeaway is the ‘points system’, or how moments of appreciation are treated by men and women. The narrative goes something like this: A man cannot assume that just because he got a bigger gift worth 50 points (in his opinion) for his woman, she is bound to surprise him with equally bigger gifts that he considers worthy of 50 points. For a woman, things do not work that way. Every surprise — big or small — is cherished equally. Also, the man cannot imagine it on a transactional level and behave like “I gave her gifts worth 50 points, she gifted me only 10 points. And hence it is a difference of 40 points. I gave 40 to her, and she returned nothing.” This argument of subtraction is very crucial, according to the author. Factually speaking, those 10 points which was received by the man cannot be negated to zero just like in an arithmetic calculation.

The parallel I am drawing here pertains to privilege. (Alert: Politically problematic/incorrect statement on the way. Read at your own risk.) Certain arguments on privilege tread this path of negating the challenges a privileged person might face as well. Personally, I feel it is important to treat the difficulties of the privileged in relative terms with those of the under-privileged, and deal with them honestly rather than making them arithmetic problems, just like the one discussed above. For example, let us take the induction stove incident I mentioned at the start of this article, and give it a suffering quotient of five points. Let us consider a down-trodden family who do not have the means to cook, let alone eat, a meal. Let us assume this amounts to 500 points. Now one cannot subtract this and say it is a net difference of 495 points, and hence arrive at the conclusion that I did not suffer at all. This acknowledgement is very crucial, and can go a long way in addressing disparities without being bigoted.

Another overall connection about the book I could immediately draw was how the concept of ‘value selling’ works in modern day sales. One gender could be assumed as the salesperson, and another as the potential, prospective customer, and this book would still make more sense than the omnipotent HubSpot course on Inbound Sales.

• God Is Not Great: How Religion Spoils Everything — Christopher Hitchens

A cursory glance at the title of the book might convey the idea that this book is only meant for atheists. Theists and staunch believers of religion would immediately feel a sense of repulsion at the first instance itself. However, I must mention that this is a book that even the most devout believers should consider reading (and I hope they do).

The reason is that till date, I am not sure of my religious stance, probably because taking time to contemplate deeply on aspects of belief systems is a rarity even for a school-going adolescent these days. My first traces of alienation towards religion started back when due to the gazillion places of worship I was subjected to on picnics and trips with family, it felt more like a duty-bound job. I did not like the idea of waking up early in the morning, or fasting against my will, so it did not make sense.

Somehow, as I kept reading this book, I started seeing the believer versus non-believer debate not as a binary, but as a spectrum. Consider a scale, where the 0 cm point signifies complete belief in religion and God, and the 15 cm point stands for complete atheism (through rational arguments or belief in Science or whatever). I, for sure, know I am not at 0 cm as much as I understand I am not at 15 cm as well. I would like to veer towards the 15 cm goalpost, but currently, I am not there. If I were at 5 cm before reading this book, I am pretty sure I moved at least 3 to 5 cm towards 15 cm.

Coming back to the book in itself, there are numerous references and theories and counter-arguments on the fallacies of Christianity, while other religions (Hinduism for its stupid superstitions, and Islam for its jingoism, apart from others) receive their fair share of thrashings (even Buddhism, the supposed gold standard for non-believers, is not spared) as well. The author ventures into deeper territories of religious texts and their hypocrisies, but also throws in simple logic then and there. For example, there is a narration about how a religious person said God has created greenery because green feels pleasant to the human eye. Evolution theories in Science prove that human eye got adopted to the ‘pleasantness’ of green over a period of time, and the claims that greenery was created in reference to the human eye is a fallacy. Arguments like these make the book much more interesting to read.

• The Most Good You Can Do: How Effective Altruism Is Changing Ideas About Living Ethically — Peter Singer

Donation is considered an act of godliness, and donors are usually given the demigod label. This book argues how, within the capitalist framework, there is scope for being altruistic. If the first and most important misconception is to do with deification of donors, the second one has to do with the assumption that people who are helping others are (meant to be) poor and uncaring about self. The book shatters both these beliefs.

It presents a case of why wealth creation is not an evil by itself, but consolidation of wealth is the actual problem that needs to be dealt with. For example, if I were earning 50,000 rupees a month and donating 20% of it (Rs. 10,000), I would be left with 40,000. I could strive and maximize my earning to 1 lakh per month, in which case I can choose to donate a higher share, say 40% (which translates to 40,000), and still be left with more money (60,000) than what used to be left to me earlier (40,000).

The author, in fact, goes on to quote a person who chose to work at the Wall Street (usually disregarded as a place of evil capitalistic intentions), just so that he would be in a position to donate more in his personal capacity. Now, we could go on to argue about whether Wall Street and its luxurious employment opportunities should be present in the first place, but effective altruism does not deal with the existence or destruction of systems of wealth creation. Given the practical constraints, how best can one live ethically is the question that the book seems to give clear answers to.

Furthermore, the book argues about why more people with the intention to work for social causes are the ones who should occupy the high-paying jobs rather than involving themselves in some charity organization. The justification provided is that the charity could easily find another person motivated enough to work on the ground, but a rich person, earning enough and more from the financial sector, but wants to donate is a rare bet; if the person who wishes to donate a lot chooses to sit back at low-paying jobs, there are high chances that someone who thinks only about self takes up that job, which means the donations that could have been done are no more a reality.

Every argument provided in this book seems highly skewed and hard to follow, but thinking back after reading the book, it is not difficult to donate 10–20% of monthly salary from a middle class person’s income. Fundamentally, the idea is to keep the essential needs for life to run smooth for oneself and give away everything else.

The book becomes hard-hitting and bold when it goes on to argue about finding objectively better causes and movements to donate. The author also talks about charities and “metacharities”, and why it is important to remain rational while engaging in donations.

• Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change From The Cult of Technology — Kentaro Toyama

Technology has grown leaps and bounds in the last two decades, and naturally, tech enthusiasts and people who engaged with tech in the earlier stages of its boom (the dot com bubble, for instance) imagine tech to be God, and themselves to be Messiahs who can provide solutions to every possible problem plaguing the world.

The author, who once had this Messianic belief also, and went on to start Microsoft Research Lab India, debunks the myth that technology is the one-stop solution to all disparities. He, in fact, goes on to argue that technology, if not used right, could deepen the disparities. With various experimental evidence from different tech-based social projects — including education — MSR Lab performed, he emphasizes that technology could only act as a tool, at best. To this extent, he puts forth the Law of Amplification, which states ‘Technology amplifies the capacity and intent of the human stakeholders involved in a process, but does not substitute for their deficiencies.’

One unforgettable reference I have reminisced and smiled at is how, during a computer literacy course for daily-wage workers in the Lab at Bengaluru, the workers started searching everything with a .com (he mentions that a back-end monitoring provided details of numerous searches of pokiri.com, after they had been taught to download/transfer movie songs). The author makes the point that any value-add the technology is supposed to provide stops at the level of the basic understanding of the working of a device, and not really a learning on the deeper benefits using tech.

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Summing up, each book has provided some deeply etched impacts that are sure to influence my actions in the future. If the references I have given to a particular context or an idea in the books do not go well with your ideology or thought process, please treat my parallels as aberrations, and do not dismiss the importance of the books. Happy reading!

First published in Pens Turf on April 23, 2020