Book Review – The Dark Net, Jamie Bartlett

 

We humans have always fantasized about invisibility. From being defined as one of the eight great powers attained through spiritual practices, to being depicted as the superpower of noble heroes or evil villains in movies, the power of invisibility has always ruled human imagination. Ask anybody as to what they would do if they can be invisible for a day and the answers will range from plain, simple pranking to wicked acts of violence and voyeurism. You will soon realize that it is best for the power of invisibility to remain invisible (pun intended) from us humans for a very long time to come.

But modern technology has given us very many ways to remain anonymous, if not invisible, and we humans are making do with the same to the best of our abilities. From being restricted to sending anonymous parcels or making bogus calls, we humans have gained enhanced abilities through technology. It is nowhere more clearly visible than it is in the world of internet. Using anything apart from our own photos as profile pictures and setting our ‘status’ as offline even while being online, are just two of the innocuous ways in which we remain anonymous. Creating fake profiles, sharing false information both fall on the other end of the anonymity spectrum.

But there are methods more advanced that truly define the term anonymity in today’s social-media obsessed world. And, these are the methods used to access and inhabit that hidden corner of the web, aptly called ‘the dark net’. It is dark not only in terms of hiddenness but also in terms of the emotional/intellectual darkness that prevails there. Just as how people would have answered our question of what they would do if they become invisible, here too people exercise their invisibility to do many things – from playing simple pranks (hacks) to performing vile acts. ‘The Dark Net’ by Jamie Bartlett does a great work in throwing light on everything that happens in that hidden part of internet.

This book is divided into seven chapters, reminding me of the similar number of vices that Christianity warns us against. The first of the vices discussed in the book is trolling. While pranking is for simple people, the anonymity cloak offered by the internet has been a boon to bullies. Today, anybody with a smartphone and internet connection can abuse and confront anyone from any part of the world. While such behavior has spilled over to the visible part of the internet these days, the revolting kind of trolling is prevalent more in the dark web. In fact, from obscene messages to disgusting images, there is nothing revolting for these bullies. These trolls don’t even refrain from making fun of funerals, mind you!

Then, there are racists, staunch nationalists and bitter radicals, who use dark net to plan attacks – at times, even physical – against one another. More often than not, these are people affable and unassuming in real life, but don absolutely contrasting identities on the web, pouring all the world’s hatred and bitterness on you. While these people rely on bitter arguments to bring about political changes, there is another group working on alternative economic controls – the crypto-currencies - like Bitcoin to loosen the financial grip of the governments on their citizens. With secretive transactions and no central control, there is nothing here that the government can keep track of and raise revenues through tax. How possible or even how acceptable are such alternative currencies?! Decide for yourself.

The fourth and fifth vices practiced in the dark net both pertain to the sins of flesh. While anyone with a smart phone and internet connectivity can access pornography freely these days, there are perverted kinds that even fans of porn would shun. Dark web is a place for information and access to such practices. Pedophilia is such a perversion ostracized from the surface web, and the perverts who want to be ‘understood’ (!) and accepted for their pedophilic tendencies have made the dark web their home.

Consuming narcotic substances is a clear no-no, as preached by all the religions. So is the act of stealing. The dark web offers a marketplace for all such forbidden things and more. You can buy anything from drugs to banned books to murderous weapons, all safely hidden from the prying eyes of the government. Strangely, the principles of economy and customer satisfaction seem to apply to these hidden marketplaces as well as they are in real markets.

While gluttony is the last of our seven vices, the act of starving oneself in order to shred every last ounce of flesh from the body seems to be an act of normalcy for some in the dark net. So is the practice of harming one’s own self or even ending one’s life. From motivating people to starve for days together, to mentoring people on harming one’s self, sometimes even egging on people to commit suicide, it all happens in the dark net.

Kudos to the author for handling such a dark subject in a matter-of-fact manner! Without standing on a high-pedestal and looking down on the inhabitants of dark net, deriding them for not following the social mores, the author presents the facts, about how they are simple people like the rest of us, their arguments and reasons that pushed them to that darkness. Reading through the book, one cannot wonder but find one’s own mind straddle the thin line between rights and wrongs, just as all these aspects of dark net are prevalent, to a lesser extent, in the visible web as well. In fact, dark web is not all evil and villains. It is just for people who prefer to carry out their activities anonymously. Sadly, anonymity is preferred more by those who have some not so acceptable agendas.

I picked up this book hoping to get a technical insight into the dark web, about TOR browser, technical configurations and so on. Instead, I ended up wondering about the dark, hidden depths of the human mind, which make possible the presence of the dark web. I have always believed that given enough darkness, we will all unleash our inner demons. ‘The Dark Net’ strengthens that belief. A good read!

Book Review – Life Lessons from Lal Ded (Edited by Shonaleeka Kaul)

‘Ekam Sat Vipra Bahuda Vadanti’ is a Sanskrit saying that every human in our country once learnt and lived by, but has conveniently forgotten now in these hate-filled modern times. Put in plain terms, it means ‘The Truth is one. The learned call it by various names’. This was meant to teach us all that the Supreme Godliness pervades all through the universe, permeating through all beings, animate and inanimate, big and small, young and old alike. Myriad saints and savants that walked this holy land kept reiterating the same, but we humans, the naïve ones that we are, keep forgetting that lesson.

‘Life Lessons’ from Aleph Book Company is a commendable effort to give us an introduction into the lives and realizations of the many holy personas from our glorious past. There are five

books in the series that tell us about the lives and lessons from Adi Shankara, Guru Nanak, Mahavira, Lal Ded and Moinuddin Chishti. This book by Lal Ded is the fourth one in my collection, with only the book of Chishti pending to adorn my shelf yet.

Lal Ded, or Lalleshwari as she was formally known, was a Shaivite saint from the 14th Century Kashmir. Said to have had a simple beginning and a failed marital life, she turned to spirituality to find the root cause of her suffering and seek liberation from it all. After she succeeded in her quest by following the Shaivite method of seeking the truth, she went around, alone, on foot, urging her fellow humans to seek liberation from all the illusions and travails that kept them bound to their mundane lives.

This book contains her ‘vaaks’ (wise sayings) on how we are bound by earthly emotions, how we can see through that all and attain the Supreme Consciousness that is all around us, unnoticed and unsought. A good to have book for those who are open to seeking the various ways that all lead to the single destination – the Supreme God. Will be a good gift for children too, if you want them to grow up understanding that God is only one, and all the bickering around in His (or, is it a Her?!) name is, simply, bollocks!

Book Review – Superhubs, Sandra Navidi

Being the mere mortal that I am, once in a while I too fall prey to the hype created by the well-meaning friends around me, at least when it comes to book recommendation. This year, this is the second such book which was sold to me – not literally though – with a huge hype, but which ended up as just another dull ones.

The book promises to show us how the world’s most powerful financial organizations and their bosses influence our lives by their decisions. I was sitting up eagerly hoping for an adventurous ride, able to get an inside view into the business intricacies of global finance and economy. But the book was filled up with the ostentatious parties and endless conferences that the finance bigwigs get to attend to all through the year. For a while, the book feels like it is trying to teach you the need for a good networking amongst your peers and superiors. Then it feels like a roster of who-is-who of the global finance and the parties they attend and the cabals they are parts of. I couldn’t control letting out an occasional yawn every now and then.

After striving to pay repeated, utter obeisance to the overlords of financial world, especially to people like George Soros and Nouriel Roubini, recalling their names with superior adjectives almost every other time they are mentioned, the author shifts gears at last, just as I was losing interest to even skim through the pages. She started talking about some serious topics like how exclusive and single dimensional these ‘super-hubs’ are, less represented by people of other gender and other races. She also started talking about the muck – corruption, arrogance & indifference to the plight of lesser mortals like us - that is covered up beneath all that veneer of opulence that shimmers on the high profile bankers.

Ironically though, just as the author improved the tempo, letting go of all the bragging and boring obsequiousness, she seemed to have lost interest. This was clearly seen in a bunch of spelling and grammatical errors that mar those pages. Imagine! Just as you start reading something worthwhile on those pages!

The author ends the book with a half-hearted call to reform the global financial network, and restrain the unbridled - often times unethical - pursuit of wealth. But who will bell the cat?! There is no definitive answer or any meaningful discussion.

So, just to sum it up all, it doesn’t contain any meaningful insights about how the global financial systems work or how they influence our lives, if that is what you were trying to learn as I initially did. This book is more about how the behemoths of finance mingle and mesh, with their unimaginable wealth and the relentless pursuit for more, especially when written by an insider who looks at them with a twinkle in her eyes!

Boring! Obsequious!! Boastful!!!

Book Review – Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari

I have read quite a number of books that ended up disappointing me. Some of those were gifted by well-meaning friends. Some of them were books I bought on an impulse. Then there were books that I had waited years to read only to find them unworthy of all those years of patience. But this book by Yuval Noah Harari tops the list. Just imagine reading a book that all your friends were going gaga about, only to find that there is nothing worthwhile in it and wondering whether you are really a good reader at all, now that you don’t even like a book that the whole world around you seems to love!

Let’s clear a few things first, before you think of bashing me up. This is a commendable effort by Mr. Harari to summarize the whole history of mankind and its evolutionary tale. During the initial pages, I too thought that this will be one of the best reads on anthropology. But this book promises a lot only to deceive. We statisticians use the term confirmation bias, which means the tendency to favor and present only those information that are supportive to one’s beliefs. This book is full of them. Harari had decided to present all that is wicked and weak about Homo Sapiens and he has succeeded to a large extent.

Not that I am complaining. I for one have never held the notion that we humans are special beings sitting atop the food chain, placed there by a favorable god who created us all in his (or, is it a ‘her’?) own image. I think of us as a different species of apes that managed to evolve a little quicker than our cousins. Despite our use of advanced languages, costly clothes and snazzy gadgets, internally we remain the beasts that roamed the vast forests once. I see nothing special about being human. This book helped cement that belief in my mind by discussing the idiocies and idiosyncrasies of our species as a whole.

But that’s just about it. This book isn’t ‘a brief history of humankind’, but the opinions of Mr. Harari about the various aspects of human evolution. This isn’t a chronological history in the lines of ‘What on Earth Happened?’ by Christopher Lloyd or ‘A Short History of Nearly Everything’ by Bill Bryson, both of which I found to be far more informative and interesting than this one. This is both a philosophical take and passing of judgments by Mr. Harari on what he considers to be the vital cogs of human evolution, namely Cognitive Revolution, Agricultural Revolution & Scientific Revolution. There is nothing that you end up learning that you already didn’t learn, especially in case you had read those two aforementioned books.

Sorry, dear friends. I have read much better books. 2.5 stars!

Book Review - The Arts of Seduction, Seema Anand

Sex!

The utterance of the very word has become a sort of taboo in our society. From being the land that gave the world the Kama Sutra and the Khajuraho, we have all become prim and perverted. So much so that even when the word ‘Sex’ is found on an official form, we prefer to term it as ‘gender’ instead of using ‘the other word’. While the reasons for such a drastic shift in sentiments deserve a book on their own, a gentle reminder of our ancient, less prudish past is something that has long been due. This book is one such a positive step in that direction.

What Ms. Seema Anand tries to do in this book is to distill the essence of Kama Sutra and present it in a more practical form. I must say that she succeeds to a large extent. This book is sort of primer to that erotique sans pareil - Kama Sutra. Cutting all those lengthy depictions and stringent syllabi, the author has succeeded to a large extent in keeping the poetic nature of the work alive. Kudos to that!

One glaring error in the whole of the book is, while depicting the weird habit of the Maharaja of Patiala, Ms. Seema mentions Mr. Natwar Singh as the author of ‘Freedom at Midnight’. To my humble knowledge, Mr. Natwar Singh hasn’t written any such book. The subject though could have been a part of his other book ‘The Magnificent Maharaja’. In a book that is written with much meticulous research on ancient manuscripts, this error stands out like a sore thumb. Otherwise a neat job though.

To summarize, Kama Sutra was the work that stripped away (pun intended) the vulgarity and obscenity from sex and presented it for what it is – an act of extreme pleasure when approached aesthetically. This book by Seema Anand is a gentle reminder to that lost treasure which is now only read in secret. A decent read!

Ten Things A Man Learns When Wife Goes Out of Town

1. Whoever feels that husbands have a nice time when their wives are away is either unmarried or a lazy person!
 

2. The stove remains hot for at least half-an-hour after you turn it off. Forgetting this lesson will give you some ‘lasting memories'.
 

3. Sweeping the floor is a good exercise for the lower back. It also explains how the wife is able to discover the lost buttons, coins, and miscellaneous trinkets at ease.
 

4. The t-shirts, no matter how comfortable they feel, are supposed to be changed once in, at least, three days - every day, if it is summer. Not learning this will ‘alienate’ you from the people around.
 

5. Cooking is not just another hobby. At times, it is the difference between going to bed with a tummy stuffed with all the open-market junk and a well - or at least safely - fed tummy.
 

6. There is nothing in the world that a man cannot do which his wife can do. Except when it comes to bashing the neighbor women for 10 minutes straight for a transgression they committed 10 months ago, and still manage the most amicable smile when they meet one another.
 

7. It takes more effort to maintain things as they are than it might take to change them.
 

8. Refrigerator and the wardrobe both serve different purposes.
 

9. It takes as much effort to run the house as it takes to run a small organization, except that there are no designations, no promotions, no increments and definitely no retirement when it comes to being the 'housewife'.
 

and, finally,
 

10. Bricks, steel, concrete, colors, wood, glass and so many other things make a house. But it is only the companionship of a loving person that can turn it into a home!

Book Review – The Adivasi Will Not Dance, Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar

India, as we all know, is a land of diverse cultures, different peoples, customs, languages and lifestyles. Some of us get to experience that diversity through travel, visiting places and finding people as they are, relishing the experiences thus gained. For the rest and most of us, books offer a window into that vastness and one resolution that I had for 2020 is to explore the works by regional authors, be it fiction or otherwise. This book was one such a choice and what a choice it turned out to be!

When it comes to writing works of fiction that represent a particular culture, the authors can choose to depict either a rosy picture, portraying their culture as supremely special or they can present the reality as it is, letting us frame our own opinions about the things thus presented. Needless to say, most of the while, it is the works of latter styles that prove to be impactful. Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar, fortunately for us all, has chosen the second style.

This book, a collection of ten short stories, will shock you and leave you with haunting memories. Like a raw wound, unattended and uncovered, this collection of stories will shock you, disgust you, invoke pity and a sense of helpless anger. Strangely, this book will also leave you wanting for more. Some stories, like that of Baso-jhi, a orphaned widow shunned by all and sundry, or that of Shubhashini, trying to reach home to her ailing son, will both invoke a sense of deep pity. Some other stories, like the couple who move across the country to Gujarat only to witness the fateful riots of 2002, or the plea of the ageing Santhal tribal who dared defy the ‘system’, will both stoke sentiments of a political nature. Stories of a prostitute who hopes for a better life or the servant maid whose moods change at the sight of money, both cause a deep sense of disgust. Equally impactful are the other four stories, each one certain to induce strong emotions in their own way.

The language is unpolished and yet unblemished. Though the author could have toned down the depiction of physical intimacy, which almost border on pornography, it certainly doesn’t feel like cheap titillation. One negative though is the frequent use of vernacular with no meaning offered either as a footnote or endnote. Of course, one can interpret the meaning in the course of the stories, but still I would have loved to see the meanings shared separately.

There is an undertone of sadness that grips readers of the great Saadat Hasan Manto. A similar angst is bound to grip you as you finish reading this book and that I believe is the success of Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar. A memorable read!