The first thing that comes to many minds hearing the word Economics are complicated policy decisions made by nations affecting the lives of millions of their denizens. While it is true that economics drives many of such decisions, basic economics also plays an important role in our daily lives. Using Lionel Robbins definition from An Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science this field of inquiry is “the science which studies human behavior as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses“. This broad definition firmly puts in perspective that whether we like it or not many of our key decisions are in the end economic decisions. However, unlike popular science, books on popular economics (not just popular books on economics) were never the norm of the day. Though one might argue that books like Tipping Point and Wisdom of the Crowds are in fact works on economics, they often masqueraded as some management hocus-pocus or general reading.

Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner’s Freakonomics however changed that. It was unabashedly a book on economics and deals in a rational manner with issues that normally have no connection with the field: cheating school teachers and sumo wrestlers, the discrimination against certain sections in game shows and against black-sounding names in job interviews, the links between abortion and crime rates and whether crime pays or not. Most of these issues are often drowned in rhetoric on social norms and morality but Levitt and Dubner prefer to make their arguments based on logic and rationality going as far as to define practical ways to measure the effect of what they preach. Their approach is refreshingly different because they neither put these studies on a pedestal, accessible only to a select few, nor did they water down the analysis to an extent that any serious thought into the matter would have found their logic to be tenuous. Rather Levitt’s intellect and Dubner’s skill in prose produced a book with which an interested reader could constructively engage.

The second interesting work in this field is by Tim Harford. While in Freakonomics, it was Levitt who did the economics and Dubner who did the writing, Tim is both rolled into one. However, he unlike Levitt is not an economist but rather a student of economics. His books The Undercover Economist and The Logic of Life are peppered with references to works of economists both past and present. Also Tim shows an willingness to grapple with much greater canvasses though his work then does not remain as impeccable. Harford’s books deal with issues ranging from the differential pricing of coffee and difference between a Walmart and a upmarket retail joint to world trade and development of third world countries. Tim’s books cover much wider ground but its solutions lack the immediacy that Levitt provides.

While the above are great introductions to the field of Economics for a layman, reference must be made to a couple of more books. The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers by Robert Heilbroner and New Ideas from Dead Economists by Todd Buchholz are great reads to get a grasp how the current thinking has evolved over the years. Another book similar in its subject matter to Freakonomics or Undercover Economics but a trifle more rigorous in its treatment of subject matter is Micromotives and Macrobehavior by Nobel Laureate Thomas Schelling. This book is an excellent read for it shows how small deviations from the norm by individuals often results in situations that can best described as utterly deviant in the macro level. People who liked reading Tipping Point will find much to appreciate in this.

Economics and rationality has become very often either the stick to beat down arguments branding them as “economically unfeasible” or has become the whipping slave for all with the argument of “there is no rational man”. Between each of these extremes however, there is much that we as imperfectly rational beings and societies, glean from two and half centuries of studies in this field and these books are great attempts at that.

Pechorin is not your typical hero. Infact he might be amongst the most villainous of characters in the whole of literature, because his acts of treachery and betrayal are conducted not with a selfish motive that can be understood, but rather with a nonchalant attitude that is frightening. That this work was greeted with mass outrage by critics, after its first publication in 1840, is therefore unsurprising. What is surprising however, is that this brief psychological sketch, still manages to ensnare the reader’s mind and with great precision and effectiveness paint the picture of a man who very well might be a product of his generation rather than an aberration.

There is not much to write about the plot; primarily because the book lacks one. It is rather a collection of snippets from the life of the main character. The book in short is not about the plot; it is about Pechorin, its protagonist. It starts with the narrator hearing a story about Pechorin from a fellow traveler in Caucasus. The next episode is the narrator himself meeting Pechorin in person and the final parts are snippets from Pechorin’s diary. The reader thus gets a 360 degree view of the character. As far as I know it is the most complete character description in literature encompassing the first, second and third person’s viewpoints. Readers often complain about one dimensional characters; A Hero of our Time is an exercise in creating a multidimensional one.

Pechorin is the quintessential Byronic hero; someone who is “mad, bad and dangerous to know”. The second and third person viewpoints sketch out the essence of his character for the reader. However, it is in the first person description, that we realize what is it like to be such a character. It is often said that once the problem is known it is an easier problem to fix it. Pechorin diaries show the mind of tormented character, who knows what is wrong and how is it that he has reached this wrong state, but is utterly unconcerned by this apparently wrong state and the consequences of this wrong action. Is this what Lermontov calls “the portrait of vices of out generation in their ultimate development”? But the most damning critique of the societal norms is that in spite of his character flaws and its causes, Pechorin remains a human capable of feeling love, grief, longing and desire.

The way the character is developed reminded me of The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg and Viper’s Tangle by Francois Mauriac. Also those who will see shades of Pechorin in Turgenev’s Bazarov (Fathers and Sons) or Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov (Crime and Punishment) are not alone. After reading this work, I am fairly sure all that came after it could not remain unaffected by this great piece of literature.

… during which the world seems to have taken a U-turn on its head, I blog again.

Manchester United stutter after their money making trip to Riyadh and drop points drawing with Spurs and losing at home to City. That the loss was on the 50th anniversary of the Munich disaster is a matter of further chagrin. The logo free retro jerseys and one minute silences are all right but IMO a win would have been a better tribute to possibly the finest set young players England has ever seen,  Fergie’s Fledglings and Wenger’s Wedglings included. Capello on the other hand seems to be instilling the winning mentality, the lack of which is the latest scapegoat for England’s failure in international competitions. Now that Joe Cole has made the left sided position a matter of non-issue they had to find a new excuse but seem to be running out of options here.

Big fish attempts to eat big fish fight big fish. Microsoft, the big bad wolf seems to be very keen on eating the lost and wandering Red Riding Hood that now is Yahoo!. With no presence whatsoever in the web domain MS is seeing its leadership position in matters relating to personal computing erode away at rate faster than Carl Lewis record breaking sprint and Yahoo!, though a rambling and directionless firm, has enough user base to give a semblance of competition to Google. Now whether Google is the benign woodcutter or an evil warlock is yet to be seen. But the fate of Red Riding Hood in this story seems to be sealed.

Financial markets continue to their Samudra Manthan, with each new day bringing joy and sorrow in some measure. Indian markets have taken to liking the sine wave functions, rising and falling with the phases of the moon. On the global front, UBS seems to be the hardest hit institution in every financial crisis. They seemed to have discovered some earlier unknown positions in subprime mortgages. Talking of the unknown, Societe Generale or SocGen suddenly discovered that they had been Leesoned by a rogue trader who manipulated their effective management controls to plunge the bank into almost a crisis. If they were a little more aware of their trader’s activities than and not of their obvious frenchness, matters might not have come to this stage.

Lastly, me has been not reading and trying to get a new job so that I can read books and see even after I pass out of IIMA. Hopefully, I will blog again soon.

X-Men remains one of the most enduring and loved comic book franchises of all time, because in Stan Lee’s words “never in the history of comicdom have there been stories more filled human interest, believable characterization, far-out fantasy combined with stark, shattering realism“. And no story arc epitomizes these words better than the Dark Phoenix Saga, the tale of Jean Grey realizing her ultimate potential and horror of being the Phoenix and choosing to sacrifice herself to save the universe.

Since the time it was first published, Jean Grey has been resurrected many times over as her moniker Phoenix suggests and many others have taken the mantle but nothing matches the sheer shock of seeing Jean Grey, literally the girl next door, turn into the devourer of worlds. Even when she destroys a world and the billions of lives inhabiting it, genocide of a scale that Hitler would flinch at, the reader is still forgiving her for she is not Jean Grey but the Dark Phoenix. But she realizes, much before the reader does, that the Dark Phoenix and Jean Grey are one and the same. It is not possible to let one live and other die. For the safety of the worlds she has to die.

But again in Stan Lee’s words DPS is not only about Jean’s sacrifice; it is also about Cyclops‘ sorrow, Kitty Pryde’s discovery of her powers, the deviousness of Mastermind as Jason Wyngarde and diabolical conniving of the Hellfire club. It is first and foremost a very very well told story; much better than one will find in award winning movies or best selling novels.

Lastly, though the X-Men movies are amongst the reasonably well made comic book movies, X-Men-The Last Stand, which incorporates elements from this story arc, does scarce justice to the Dark Phoenix Saga. It neither brings out the frailty of Jean’s humanity in face of Phoenix’s divinity nor does it show her mental strength in choosing and accepting her fate.

The only thing that propels me to see every movie by a Tom, Dick, and Harry is that once in a while, by sheer chance on basis of the large numbers involved, I get my hands on one these classic masterpieces that people seem to have forgotten. After a week of seeing what I very generously term “action flicks with hot chicks” (now that I think of it this topic in itself deserves a blog post), Hopscotch was a reminder that you don’t need to make a few hundred cars to blow up and a few million bullets to be fired to make a good spy movie. Yes, The Bourne Ultimatum does give you that nice adrenaline rush as Matt Damon runs through world capitals like he runs through his list of girlfriends or something but it does get boring after a time. Movies like Hopscotch though you could see anytime.

The idea that spies are this set of nasty people, more like machines and rather indestructible too, is what comes when you read much too many Ludlum or Follett novels. On the other hand, if you are fan of the early Forsyth or the Le Carre (minus their moodiness) protagonists you would see spies as rather smart people who more than anything else have dollops of black humor poured on them and are rather nihilistic since they do the job not for the love of some flag or something but because they are good at it. Miles Kendig portrayed immaculately by Walter Matthau is one such spy. And he is taken off the field by his I-really-want-to-punch-you-on-the-face boss Myerson and decides to teach the entire agency a lesson. The old dog then proceeds to run rings around them before publishing a book of his memoirs. And yes there is romance with an old flame and the evil Russian as well, who seems to enjoy the game of his friend as much as his American boss hates it.

In his Criterion Collection essay Bruce Eder says

Ronald Neame’s Hopscotch has the distinction of being the only “feel-good” realistic spy film ever made. As the movie walks a fine line between serious drama and satirical comedy, and between topicality and escapism, it beguiles the viewer with its sophistication and complexity. The most surprising aspect of Hopscotch, however, may not be how well it walks that tightrope, but that its makers accomplished this balancing act in an era that saw the spy movie genre reduced to tales of relentless despair.

Add to this a touch of tongue-in-cheek Brit humor and you have a perfect cocktail. But seriously, don’t take his or my word for it. Go and watch it.

This is just so weird that I have to abandon my blogging stupor and write about this. Today, I saw three comments on this blog; a number beyond my imagination.

But all of them turned to be on one post: the rather spare review I had written sometime back of the His Dark Materials trilogy by Phillip Pullman. Given the content of the books I am not surprised that there is a campaign against them by the established church. And with a well publicized movie in the wings (and I heard of the books from the trailers shown before Spiderman III) a larger number of people are going to be exposed to it. Hence, the ongoing war to the movies and the books has shifted to the internet.

All that aside, clearly the comments on my post were spam. They all sounded the same, lacked a single coherently strung thought and were posted on the same day at very similar times. But the wondrous thing was narrowness of the spam attack or that the excellent Akismet spam catcher failed to catch it. To the casual reader, they might even look like genuine comments so pertinent are they to the theme of the post.

And suddenly, I shudder at the thought of a future where with considerable amount of my personal information on public domain I will be subjected these inane but outwardly pertinent messages.

Writing about Snow Country, the immediate metaphor that comes to mind is that of a Haiku. The reviews at the end of the book alluding to it, and the Japanese connection, though definitely existent, are not the cause of this comparison; rather the fact of it being a short piece pregnant with such numerous possibilities that prompts it. Also similar to Haiku is the challenge thrown to the reader – of figuring out the complete picture from the description of a small and yet significant portion. The description would allow many explanations, but in very few of those would the described event carry such weight. Snow Country to an extent can be seen as an exercise in figuring out the unknown at various levels; plot, character and even the geography.

Yet Kawabata does leave us with some clues; for he thus outlines the content of his description very early in the novel:

“In the depths of the mirror the evening landscape moved by, the mirror and the reflected figures like motion pictures superimposed one on the other. The figures and the background were unrelated, and yet the figures, transparent and intangible, and the background, dim in the gathering darkness, melted together into a sort of symbolic world not of this world.”

It is this world of juxtapositions and shifting realities, this quicksand of human emotions that Kawabata endeavors to describe.

Snow Country is primarily the tale of two women, Yoko and Komaku, and futility of their relationship with one man, Shimamura. While the theme of a decaying beauty waiting for its beloved is not new, it is Kawabata’s characterizations which lend the novel its uniqueness. Yoko and Komaku provide the buttress for each other characters and the counterpoint for Shimamura’s, much like a haiku again – it is through description of Komaku’s activities that we are asked to deduce Yoko’s character, while their undying flames of passion are contrasted against the cold lassitude and timidity of Shimamura. His annual bouts of remembrance and return to the snow country are beautifully set against the changing seasons. While saying nothing explicitly, the entire setup of the novel points towards one inexorable end.

The only problem with Kawabata is that the reader needs to extremely culturally sensitive. Since the actions described are often mundane, the text can become boring and as a consequence the reader can miss some action that is not culturally significant. However, for if invested with adequate patience Snow Country can be an extremely enriching read.