Sunday, September 21, 2014

If flawsaphor chooses .....!

Ten Amazing Books

It is very difficult for anyone – well-read or otherwise – to choose 10 or 20 books as the best they have read and make it as public too. Such actions are always fraught with the danger of one missing out prominent or popular book or even nominating less deserving ones. But given the highly individualistic nature of action involved, the level of subjectivity can never be wiped out. It is all the more difficult for people like me, being in the kind of profession I am in, it is a Himalayan task. People in my trade inevitably read thousands of words day in and day out – covering a wide range of subjects. So, making a list of best 10 books is almost impossible given the sheer range of subjects we are exposed to given each one of us tend to read books in the subjects we love more than others.
Through three and a half decades that I have been reading books on a constant basis, one thing most irritating is people coming up, every now and then, with posts like “The 10 books that shaped my life” or some such similar mindless stuff. Can books alone shape one’s life? Books are part of any given culture and one of the many tools that shape a person’s life and career. Again, when the word ‘Culture’ is uttered people tend to think of many gaseous and vacuous stuff. The habits, mores, customs, practices, value systems, institutions, societal tools, laws and many more comprise culture. Given all these, such claims are nothing but a pretentious, attention grabbing techniques.

So, here I am choosing 10 books among thousands that attracted me most – though they might not have had even 1% impact on my life and thinking pattern and ability. I am choosing these just for the sheer ability to arouse curiosity and interest.
      
               1)   Dialogues of Plato –translated and edited by Benjamin Jowett 



If there is a sheer joy and happiness in written words [mention irony!], they are in these dialogues. It is amazing to even conceive that people who lived thousands of years ago discussed the fundamental problems of human living thread bare and the dialogues have withstood the test of time and changing value systems. Bertrand Russell corrupted my mind and I may tend to believe with Russell in the superiority of Plato’s imagination and the dialogues could be a book of fiction, yet this remains one of the foremost books that will arouse curiosity and logical thinking in young minds.



2)  Gay Science by Nietzsche - translated and edited by Walter Kauffman


This book has become popular by the atheists and agnostics from all over the world for about a century now for the famous “God is Dead.” But these claims stem more from defective understanding of the book and inability to comprehend the thread. I know people will throw stones at me, but I stick my neck out and cling on to what I am telling. Aphorisms, scathing assessment of luminaries and throwing light on humanness, this book has all that and much more. Whether this was the precursor to “Thus Spake Zarathustra” or its sequel, the book remains my favorite.




3)    Commentaries on Living series by Jiddu Krishnamurti 




If there is someone who is most misunderstood and most underrated thinker, then it has to be JK. In this series and throughout his lifetime, he comprehended much in advance the lives human beings would be leading in the digital and mechanical era, rapidly declining value systems and deterioration of reasoning and pleaded with the listeners in one talk after another. Yet none of us seem to have listened to him – at all. The lives we are leading is an ample testimony to that.






4)    Surely You’re Joking Mr Feynman

This is one book from the title to last page that captivates the imagination of the readers. As such it is a simple book that records the adventures of Feynman through his life, his remarkable insights in the working of physics and the laws of nature etc. But the success of this book lies in the fact that every single reader wanted to open the safes, drink tea with lemon and cream, investigate every disaster of the machines and all such adventures of Feynman. Every travel junkie harried around to find more about Tannu Tuva and yearned to visit this remote land after reading Sure You’re Joking, Tuva or Bust and the Last Journey. Feynman broke the myth that scientists have to be mysterious and serious and this book highlights a fundamental truth that any proper understanding of Nature and expressions of such an understanding have to be simple so that any layman can understand them. 

5)    Godel, Escher, Bach – An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter


If there is one book after reading which a youngster would emerge more knowledgeable than ever before, it is this one. Taking common themes from the works of Godel, Escher and Bach, Hofstadter tears into the foundations of intelligence, meaning, symmetry and almost whole of life – how cognition, intelligence and communication are possible. As the book progresses, every page is a treat with breathtaking paintings of Escher, koans, general puzzles and emerging new meanings and patterns of life. After the book, every reader is bound to view every dimension of life from a new angle. One word – Exhilarating.


6) The Self and its Brain – by Popper and Eccles


Simply put, this is a book that talks about interaction between body and mind, how biological and chemical processes impact thoughts, behavior etc. It would have ended up as one of the countless boring philosophical debates but for the individual brilliance of Karl Popper and John Eccles. Dividing the book into three parts, Popper deals first with the world of objects – the phenomena, Eccles, the acclaimed neurophysiologist, with the neurological understanding of thoughts, emotions etc and the final part is the dialogue between the philosopher and the neurophysiologist. This is a very fundamental book but a very important one for understanding dualism that asks very significant questions such as how life emerged from matter among others. But the sub-title of the book “an Argument for Interactionism” gives away what is the fundamental problem with the western thought. Unlike Hindu philosophies which treat mind, thoughts etc as physical, whole lot of European philosophies have treated mind, thoughts and emotions as something apart from physical world. This problem is beyond Popper and Eccles, yet this is a very significant conversation from about 40 years ago.


7)     The man who mistook his wife for a hat – Oliver Sachs




In this book of 24 remarkable essays featuring the descriptions of case histories of some of his patients, Sachs takes us through a journey of enchanting and yet frightening world of people with abnormal faculty functioning and yet very sad in real life. In the centuries that went by these people would have been dismissed as possessed by evil and in some cultures would have been beaten to death. 






8)    Bhaarathiyaar Kavithaigal





This is one of the most captivating and energizing poetry collections that one can ever lay one’s hands upon. To me personally it is one of the eternal fountains of creativity compressed into few lines of poetry. Nothing more. Go read and get inspired!





9)     The Secret Doctrine by Madame Blavatsky



There is a running joke that if there is one book that no human ever completed including its author, it has to be Secret Doctrine by Blavatsky. It is a mammoth book with tall claims, with equally stunning range of subjects covered, from philosophy to religion to occultism to science and evolution of races, and extraordinary details. Even discounting the subjects covered in the book, I doubt whether any human being other than Blavatsky knew so many languages, had such in-depth knowledge of the lost civilizations and remarkable foray into future and distant planets in the solar system and beyond. From Atlantis and Lemuria to life in Venus this book covers a vast range of interesting postulations with intricate details and elaborate footnotes. Major sections are really boring but proem and those sections dealing with remote cultures and civilizations are really interesting. But I doubt the book indeed achieves the claim it makes – wedding religion and modern science.


10)     The History of Dharma Shastra by P.V. Kane


Kane wrote this magnum opus of his over three decades! This book in five volumes is a rare collection and interpretation of evolution of social codes and laws through two thousand years in India. From the worship of stones on the road to highest philosophies, from the role of law texts in the lives of ordinary people to rules governing the rulers, from the controversies concerning the existence of multiple texts and authors to evolution and creation of modern Indian law, from greatest poetries of India to religious schools and monasteries – there is nothing about India that this book does not touch upon. For me the greatest strength of this book is neutral analysis of all the topics it covers – caste system, the role of so called scriptures in the lives of people, beef eating, astrology, astronomy, so on and so forth. This one book has been the launch pad of thousands of books on all the topics it covers. As Olivelle observed, it is the single most telling contribution by any individual in India from the medieval times onwards.

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As I said in the beginning it is inevitable that many good books would get unmentioned. May be there are 100 more such books. However, time and health permitting, I may write few lines in near future about

1.      The Emperor’s New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds and 
the Laws of Physics by Roger Penrose

2.     The Society of Mind by Marvin Minsky

3.     Morphic Resonance: The nature of formative causation by Rupert Sheldrake

4.     Myth of Invariance: The origin of Gods, Mathematics and Music 
by Ernest McClain

5.    Collected Works of Baba Saheb Ambedkar

6.     The biological and historical significance of Vedic mythology 
by A.K. Bhattacharyya

7.     One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

8.     Ulladu Naarpadhu by Ramana Maharshi

9.     An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding by David Hume

10.                       Adi Shankara's commentary of Bhagavad Gita

11.    The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir