Book Reviews: "Secret Keeper" & "If Cricket is a Religion, Sachin is God"

Sorry for talking about two rather unrelated books in the same blog, but it so happens they are actually related to each other in the sense that I read them in sequence. :)

Firstly, I finally managed to take "Secret Keeper" by Mitali Perkins off my reading list. For a book categorized under "Young Fiction", it did not sound "young" at all and I very much enjoyed the book. The conflicts in the story are established quite nice-and-easily in the first half and the resolution of the conflicts in the second half were surprising and enjoyable. I did not anticipate the way the story was ended, but as I said, I thoroughly enjoyed it. This read and my previous read "Shine, Coconut Moon" by Nisha Meminger were both based on their respective reviews at Brown Paper by Niranjana Iyer. Having enjoyed both, I have started noting down reads from her reviewed list into my reading list.

Secondly, I finished reading "If Cricket is a Religion, Sachin is God" by Vijay Santhanam and Shyam Balasubramanian. I picked this one up from flipkart after Sachin stroked his masterful ODI double hundred. Having been an on-and-off Sachin critic over the years, I was finally convinced of his greatness after that particular innings. And the purchase of this book followed on an impulse.

While I have to say that I enjoyed reading the book in its entirety, there were places where either the discussion was a drag or totally misplaced. The authors are gushing with their passion for the little master and it shows in every page. In general, the idea is to convince you of two things - Sachin's statistics are super awesome and that he is a God, because what he achieved belittles the achievement of every other cricket in this or previous generations (except the Don, of course) through various arguments. Sometimes the arguments are compelling and at other times, they are purely irritating either for being biased, or lacking the complete context.

On the good side:

• Really wonderful statistics - let there be no doubt about it. They have gone to pains to explore various angles of the numbers, both of Sachin and his contemporaries.
• The "Age 33" factor, coined by the authors, reveals that at the age of about 33, all great batsmen tend to lose their way, with some rebounding and others not. Revealing. Most revealing.
• The parallel that they draw with Vishwanathan Anand's success. Having been guilty of not following Vishy's career, this comparison was revealing to say the least.
• Chapter 8, title "The case for Sachin", where they compare him to his Indian compatriots over the years using a new measure called "batting momentum" was novel and quite enjoyable.

On the bad side:

• They have clearly chosen to ignore Sachin's leadership issues. Clearly, Sachin's career had a major flaw in terms of Sachin's 2 failed attempts at captaincy. This discussion was clearly missed, and probably deliberately left out since it would have diluted their claims.
• While Sachin's performances over the years are nothing short of exemplary, there was a period of time (roughly between 1999-2007), where he missed out on firing on the big occasions quite frequently (vs Aus, WC 99, vs Aus, WC 03, vs everybody WC 07, a few test matches that could have been saved, but were not and so on) and it was no surprise that the authors failed to bring it up, since it would have diluted their claims.
• It is all well that Sachin performed with greatness, but belittling the achievements of others, most notably that of Ganguly and Dravid is way too glaring to ignore. The fact that India started to win abroad in tests can be solely attributed to Dravid's single minded focus on supporting the team's batting advances way beyond anything Sachin did for years (at Adelaide 04, Dravid hit a 200 and supported the team through in the 4th innings with a fifty. Awesome.) Again, in the ODI world, Ganguly was a key pillar of strength for India between 1996-2005 and many famous victories (98 Dhaka) were designed by him. By saying that "Big 3" is not even a proper term to use, the authors are clearly just favoring their favorite son.
• Boringline, a term coined by the authors to explain the Naseer Hussain tactic of bowling outside the off stump in 96 Eng series, is being compared to Bodyline on how individual greatness of players (Don and Sachin) forced captains to take extreme steps. Really? No. Really? This is the greatest drag in the book. Boringline is so inconsequential in the history of the game that nobody even bothered coining a term for it expect these authors. There was no national outrage, no stress on the diplomatic ties, no books written on it and no movies made. Bodyline hasn't been repeated in the history of the game while "boringline" has been used every now and then, most recently by Dhoni against Aussies in 2008. So, seriously, the comparison is plain stupid. It shows that the two Sachin fanboys had to draw an unwarranted parallel between the Don and Sachin and this is what they came up with.
• Their discussion on religion up front and on Chess history later on, are both drags. The first one wasn't even tolerable, but the second one is quite enjoyable, though grossly misplaced.

All in all, the book is a good read for people who like statistics, or Sachin, or both, but their fanboyish passion and the above mentioned drags make it tough to complete it.

Book review: More sex is safer sex

Last week, I finished "More Sex is Safer Sex" by Steven Landsburg, a book in the same league as "Freakonomics", "Superfreakonomics" and "Super Crunchers", a book that talks about using economics and statistics to uncover new findings and wowing us with non-intuitive directions on how to lead our life.

In general, MSISS focusses more on the "cost-to-benefit" analysis and specializes in trying to enumerating spillover benefits and spillover costs of our various actions, something that is not as strongly focussed upon by the other books in this genre. Also, in general, the book is quite a great read. You will often be surprised by how much you agree with his thoughts after you have read them, but still you would have never thought of it yourself despite having the same data points as he has (the idea of giving each voter two votes to challenge the political system was my favorite.)

That said, there were places I strongly disagree with what he says, and there are, of course, many places where I strongly agree with his deductions. The following are all my notes:

• The opening chapter on "more sex is safer sex" assumes that there is a general nature to find multiple partners. Coming from a society like Indian, I am mostly unable to appreciate it. Having one partner is all the society focusses on and I safely agree on that. Period.
• "Be fruitful and multiply" is all screwed up. The basic assumption is that parents should have as many children as they want since there is no spillover costs. At least in India, that's not true. The more population you have who can't fend for themselves, the more is the social cost of that population - education, health care, subsidies etc, all of which are taken from taxes, which in turn is a spillover cost. Of course, my reasoning means that the wealthy can have more children and the poor cannot, but one cannot be sure if the wealthy (or poor) will remain in the same social standing and not change places. Hence, I appreciate the general policy of countries like India, which basically says all parents should stick to two children or less, irrespective of the social standing. 
• "Be fruitful and multiply" also talks about crowding and says that people chose to live in crowded places and hence shouldn't complain about it, and if they don't like it, they should go live in a different, less crowded town. Again, he doesn't know about other nations (than US), where your mere survival can only guaranteed by you living in a large city and hence the option of living in smaller towns and villages just doesn't exist. Ask a native of a Bihar village, who belongs to a lower caste and hence would have been squeezed out of his existence in his native town, and you will know.
• "Children at work" says that parents chose to send their children to work only because it is in the best interest of the family, and hence anti-child-labour protesters, coming from cushy western societies shouldn't protest because they don't know what it is to be a poor family in a slum in say Asia or Africa. Agreed. And yet, I can't understand how the same man can argue that parents should have as many kids and yet allow them to be translated into laborers. He is essentially saying it is okay to have lot of kids even if you are poor because you can send them off to child labor and recover the cost. Totally Disagree.
• Chapters "What I look about scrooge", "How to fix politics", "How to fix the justice system", "How to solve kidney shortage", "how to fight grade inflation", "Oh no! its a girl", "The high price of motherhood", "Racial profiling", "An outsourcing fable" are all brilliant reads.

Irrespective of my disagreements, I believe it is a great read for people interested in that genre. Go, pick up a copy from your local bookstore/library.

(ps: It is the first book, along with "Shine, coconut moon" by Nisha Meminger, that I picked up with my new Singapore Library membership. I have had it on my reading list for too long, but always stopped short of buying it. I am glad I picked it up finally and read through it. :-) )

Something to ponder about

If you haven't read it yet - the son of a shoemaker - Abhishek Kumar Bhartiya - has made it through IIT with a fantastic rank. Having failed at an attempt at IITJEE and then consequently ending up at IIT and having seen how difficult life is for even a middle class student in India is, I can appreciate the achievement of coming from his background and making it through JEE exams and the subsequent opportunities he would have in improving the life of his family, and potentially the society around him. Hearty congratulations to him and I wish him all the very best.

Having said that, I want to show you a picture of his family (minus the father) (photo source: Rediff.com):

Do you spot anything odd here? Anything at all?

I do - I see a family of four kids - been conceived by a shoemaker somewhere in the early 90s time period. Let's dissect it a bit. Coming from his background, the shoemaker wouldn't have had too much money to survive and afford a reasonable, hygienic lifestyle for himself, but he thought nothing of procreating 4 kids.

And he did it despite the time being 1990s (the eldest son should be around 18 and hence I am backtracking his procreation dates to 90s), which was about a decade and a half after Sanjay Gandhi had become infamous for pushing family planning. By early 1990s, as a 10-12 old kid, I was exposed to so much messaging about family planning that I fail to believe that he didn't see it, unless he was in a cave all along.

And even the standard explanation of "he wanted a son" doesn't stand here. All his children were sons - so that doesn't work too.

So, in a society where the government clearly is warning against having too many babies, and when you can't afford it, and when you have procreated 2 sons already, you still go ahead and have 2 more babies!

Now, let me be clear - this kind of behavior isn't isolated to this person, or to this strata of the society, or to this time period. (Even a classmate of mine decided to have 3 kids well into the 2000s AFTER being educated at IIT). I am just trying to highlight the fact if this is the mentality of our populace, we don't have much chance of improving our nation. We should at least learn to do what our government is telling us, whose benefits are clearly beyond doubt.

But in a country, where people routinely die (and quite often kill others) because they don't have the basic sense of following traffic rules laid out by the government, I guess I am asking for too much.

The good books from new wave of Indian authors

When I wrote last time about the new Indian authors not setting high standards for themselves when setting out to write, I felt that I was only saying one side of the story. There is the other side of the coin - one where authors produce a good story, where they use good grammar and employ sound research on any facts/situations they might be writing about. So, which books were those?

Top of my list:

• Both "If God was a Banker" & "Devil in Pinstripes" from Ravi Subramanian.
• "Keep the Change" by Nirupama Subramanian (I don't think she is related to Ravi in anyway)
• "A Romance with Chaos" by Nishant Kaushik

Both of Ravi's books are written in a racy style with well carved out characters etched in the world of banking. I was so often so immersed in the stories that I found myself wishing to be a lifer with New York International Bank (NYIB), the setting for both the books. Both were unputdownable. Ravi concentrates more on the stories and how they evolve. Places and emotions are described less, but the context of every scene was well laid out. I enjoyed both of them.

"Keep the Change", is this hilarious book about, presumably, a Tam Brahm lady from Chennai transforming herself into a career woman in Bombay trying to find love on the way. If you happen to be a Tam Brahm, the comedy presented in the story is just amazing. There were more than one occasion when the other commuters in the train, where I have my date with books, could hear a loud laugh or watch a wide grin. A must read for a Tam Brahm or those who are in relationship with one. A compelling read for others too.

Nishant Kaushik has taken simple settings of a standard software company, adding in characters of all hues, each trying to achieve their own goals. The characters are all well built up and complemented each other. The turns in the story were quite unpredictable and my best attempts to guess what might be coming were thwarted by Nishant's imaginative sequences. The philosophical dilemma, under which the protagonist is lost, as well as the possible outcomes were well presented, without it being dumbed down, nor making it too complex that the reader had to flex his brain muscles too much.

All in all, these reads were definitely worth the money I spent on them.

Circle line and confusion at Paya Lebar station

Its been almost a month since the Circle Line of the Singapore train system was opened connecting Marymount to Dhoby Ghaut and more importantly connecting Nicoll Highway, Suntec City and the Esplanade areas to the rest of the island through trains. Previously, you had to walk anywhere between 10-20 mins to get to City Hall/Bugis stations to catch a train. More importantly, with a twisted set of one way paths, bus support and frequency was also nothing to talk home about. So, in all, huge win for these localities. (Yahoo's office is in Suntec city and hence I was overjoyed to have the link, though we are relocating to a traditionally connected part of the city very soon.)

However, what has baffled me has been the design of the Paya Lebar station on the circle line. They have 4 platforms serving three lines. Two of them being the standard up and down links, but a third line to connect Marymount to Paya Lebar. I caught up with the staff at the station and they explained that the purpose was to increase the frequency of that section during peak hours.

I don't get it. Seriously. I don't get it at all. Not one bit. Here are the problems I see with it:

• Why should a higher frequency service be limited only to that section of the line? Why not extend it all the way? Every single day, during the peak hours, I have to wait 5-6 minutes to catch the train at one of the most important business centers of the city (Suntec City). 
• It creates confusion at the Paya Lebar station itself. On one aisle, board any train and you head the same direction, and stand on the second aisle and the chances of you missing the next train for your destination (towards Marymount) is very high since the next train could be from the other aisle.
• Boarding and alighting a train is generally one of the tasks needing minimum flexing of your brain muscles. But if you are coming from Marymount and heading to Suntec, not only do you need to worry about which train to take (terminating at Paya Lebar or Dhoby Ghaut) but also about changing the train though all you are doing is extending your journey on the same path. (If I have guests from outside of Singapore, I tell them to take the train since there is no confusion involved, but I will reserve the judgment when it comes to connecting them to the Circle Line).
• All this confusion also means that SMRT has to place staff at the aisles all the time, which is a permanent drain on the company's resources. Add to it the constant announcements they make to indicate "the train on the middle platform terminates it's service at Marymount" making it the noisiest and busiest stations in the city, pretty much for no reason.

Personally, I believe it is one of those cases where a simple and elegant solution (higher frequency for the entire route) would have been orders of magnitude better than a more complicated solution.