I know exactly the kind of person who would like the book. A lot of such people must surely exist considering how popular this book has become. I imagine a prototypical fan of Murakami to be a hopeless spiritualist who goes about his/her life believing that there is something supernatural and mysterious that life eventually offers, something that is forever beyond the grasp of science, logic, rationale, or even words for that matter, but at the same time its essence is such that you would be able to comprehend it if only you looked into your own being with courage, determination and honesty. Such people are not necessarily religious but they differ from those who are merely in the thrust of their own irrationality. I feel that they would very much appreciate the open-ended theme of the book with its dream-like sequences, irrationality and elaborate symbolism. They would also like this book because it doesn't really make much sense and somehow a lot of people just love it when things don't make sense, for then they can attribute to those things, their own little interpretation (however inane) and feel special and 'connected with the universe'.

I love good surrealism and imagination. Kafka's 'Metamorphosis' is a book which stands testimony to that. So does Carroll's 'Alice in wonderland'. These works have their own logic and rationale to them. They have their own set of rules which are well defined and then they go about being mad within those rules. It gives a profound sense of tautness to these works and as a reader you never feel being cheated by the author. I believe that the most pleasurable part of a work of art is its struggle against its own boundaries and in the absence of any boundaries it ends up losing much of its charm. And this is what is wrong with Murakami's book. He has disguised what appears to me his own incompetence by implicitly declaring that he won't follow any rules, not even his own. Writing becomes a lot easier for him because neither logic nor completeness have to be respected and at the same time the 'mystique' and incomprehensibility of the book lend themselves to easy adoration by the urban pseudo-intellectual brigade. And to top it all off, the utter blandness of the dialogue is irritating. Whenever the characters are not talking in single sentences, they are describing in elaborately long paragraphs as to how they have no clue what's happening to them. They seem to believe that if only they express their own robotic presence in deep and mysterious sounding dialogue, the need for at least some coherence and explanation can be done away with. And unfortunately it may not be terribly far from the truth either. A lot of people, perhaps impressed by how less the book makes sense, attribute a certain genius to Murakami which I don't think he has. They perhaps forget that a good work of art, however incomprehensible in the beginning, must lend itself to logical understanding if enough effort is put into it and that effort coupled with the eventual understanding of the work is directly proportional to how much pleasure one extracts from it.

My god I despise this book. And yet it has certain passages which have their own poetic beauty. As I said, you may even find the whole book very much to your liking. 2 and a half stars, therefore!

Don't get me wrong. I do not look back at the past with a smug glow of self-satisfaction or a vain pat on my back. More often than not, it's excruciating to confront one's own reflection in time. One would hope to have grown through the years, to have a better perspective now than one had in the past, and I am no different. It is, therefore, almost by definition true that looking back I feel inclined to dismiss my own thoughts as merely being products of a time and age which I'm wiser to have left behind. And yet this current personality, for better or for worse, is just a sum total of many such times and ages which have chiseled it through the years to produce what has emerged today. I hope that the winds of change are still blowing and that years from now when I look back to today, I would find myself as 'immature' as I find myself now when I read the things that I wrote many years ago. I have an immense respect for change and for the ability to change and I say it with a certain sense of pride that I'm neither sure what I have become, nor am I certain of the trajectory upon which I'm set.

But things used to be different. Certain unmistakable patterns emerge from the chaotic past. I seem to have started, as all young people do, from a state of utter self-confidence. I knew what was wrong with the world and I believed in the solutions which were in fashion. My world view conveniently emerged from the invisible and heavy hand of religion and tradition. Things were 'not right' and people were 'good' and bad'. The bad ones had to be corrected and things had to be set straight and the romantic idea of the way to do it would often be high on octane. There was very little cynicism, which must necessarily be the case if you want to 'do something'. I believe that I was what would normally be called a 'good person'. I believed less in the ideas of the time and more in the ideas of tradition, which is a little unusual for a young person. Had I continued on that trajectory I'd have run the danger of turning into a stupid reactionary like the ones you often hear blowing themselves up for reasons they don' t have the intelligence to comprehend. As it turns out, now I have an intense hatred for such people, not so much because they end up messing other people's lives but more so because of  how stupid they have allowed themselves to become. I have come to dislike and despise all such 'cultures of beliefs' but I'm too much of a cynic now to be bothered to do anything about them.

From a young boy who had strict loyalties which were dictated by strong beliefs and sure ideas, I have definitely come a long way. There are no more sureties and far less self-confidence. In a certain sense, there is a lot more tolerance but that tolerance is as much a product of expanded horizons as it is a precipitate of cynicism. There was a time when I was very much against social work but looking back I realize that I had chosen to disregard the utility of the whole field based just on my hatred for the smugness and the moral high ground which often accompanies it. I don't care as much now. A social outlook has given way to a more individualistic take on life and I've come to enjoy and appreciate certain facets of it which I have chosen for myself. But I really do enjoy life, which is more than what can probably be said for most people. I'm now, more than ever, in awe of the amazing variety that life offers. I'm excited, more than I have ever been, to learn from its myriad hues and brilliant possibilities.

In that sense I have become an optimist, all my cynicism and all my apathy notwithstanding. A happy new year to you!

The upshot of several years of such discussions is that now I have little tolerance for insipid, utilitarian talk. Religious debates, political allegiances, nationalistic ideas, group mentality, financial advice and many more such 'important' topics have started seeming insufferable to me unless they are being discussed within a satirical framework. And I do not understand how can they not be! Does the illogicality of petty little human obsessions repeated ad-infinitum on this little speck of nothingness we call Earth not even deserve its own chuckle? I think it does and I also think that for precisely this reason satire is the most honest and most fruitful attitude to have while discussing anything.

The only conversations which I can never seem to discuss with sarcasm are those which concern passion because existence of passion ties very well with my own individualistic take on life. Although passionate people run the risk of monopolizing conversation, they are at least honest and original even when they are not engaging, but often the existence of pure passion in a person is enough for me to have an automatic respect for him/her. It is too bad for me then that such people are few and far between.

I find that it is not concrete memories and sure pictures that we miss about people but it's their vague associations with the trivial things that they leave behind which are curiously the most poignant sources of nostalgia. As the world around me presents itself with the same clockwork precision and designed rhythm as it has always presented itself except for some minor omission effected by a departure, I begin to see the particular omissions in darker hues and bolder colors than warranted by mere appearances. I'm amazed by how little things change, how the day is still resplendent with the same glorious sunshine, and the night still bejeweled by the silent moon in the window, how the minutes and hours keep dying off with the inevitability of orchestrated dominoes and how little the natural progression of things pays heed to a new absence. And I almost feel that it's this very cruelty and apathy of time which makes me want to care a little more for sake of the memories. In the surety and blandness of order I feel drawn, almost by sympathy, to those faint marks and distant sounds which constitute all that farewells are made of. Because they are just that - mere shadows of infinitesimal defects in the pristine canvas of life. Jagged edges of time folded on to itself, wrinkles in the space which repeats itself every day.

The Selfish Gene, on the other hand, is a triumph of the intellect. It presents the theory of evolution in a way which makes the whole process tautological and the reasoning and the evidence are so beautifully presented that you cannot but marvel at the simplicity of it all. I came to understand that in the general parlance evolution is thought of in completely wrong terms. To think of it as the survival of the individual or the specie is not only simplistic, it's just plain wrong. When we talk about survival of an entity in evolutionary terms, we must at least refer to survival on a time scale large enough for the slow process of evolution to affect. Individuals and groups just do not exist on a time scale that large. The facets which do get shaped by evolutionary forces are traits and characteristics of organisms and they are controlled by gene manifestations in the DNA. It is, therefore, quite logical that evolution through natural selection must act on this small entity - the gene. It is an added benefit that by thinking of evolution in the genetic terms one can easily explain the emergence of altruism and cooperation. Dawkins does it with the delightful example of the Prisoner's Dilemma and other game theory explanations. The gene centric view of evolution also did something which appears lacking in the naive understanding of it: the theory became predictive in a restricted sense, correctly predicting sex-ratios in insect colonies among other things.

It is unnecessary to say at this point that I loved the book and that I would recommend it to prospective readers but I would like to add a qualification here. Dawkins is an exceedingly sharp guy and while reading his book I often got the unnerving feeling that he is smart enough to lead me to believe anything. He is a master reasoner and I didn't know where the boundaries of my belief in him lay. All I could do is trust that he was being rigorous because I never knew what to suspect!

28 years a nation in waiting, almost 20 years since I personally have been, a whole generation which went through the heartbreak every four years for more than 2 decades, and today it happened. And just like that, silently and subconsciously, the world cup was dedicated to the one man who has singlehandedly shouldered the hopes of the nation for the last 21 years. Makes me wonder, who's cutting the onions!

For those who have never read Wilde, I would introduce him to be a bit like that socially awkward person who doesn't want to talk much and doesn't want to join in your social gatherings, but you know that it's not because he cannot but because life to him is one solid block of glass, its mysteries, its trivialities, its splendor and its hypocrisy are transparent to him, neatly organized in alphabetized folders in his highly competent mind. He has figured out life's vagaries to an extent which most people, with their prejudices and contempt for new knowledge, will never even approach - and this is the chief basis of his reticence and his attraction. We who spurn new knowledge because it often demands stretching the social mores at their seam cannot help but be sinfully drawn to someone who has the courage which we lack.

Wilde's world is one of paradoxes. In his world every concept that one is taught, every idea which is essential to society's survival is turned on its head and presented anew. Presented thus, it has the power to shock one into a state of contemplation and induce in one a better appreciation for the very vague, very gray, and very subjective natures of all the institutions which comprise life. It is possible to view Wilde as a mere smartass who was in a perpetual quest to demonstrate his mental superiority but as Wilde probably would have said, 'it's only smartasses who ever have interesting things to say.' It's futile trying to argue his logic because he speaks to a very select audience, the very people whom he knows would not argue his points. Everyone else, in his eyes, would never get what he's trying to say and hence, by definition, is not worthy of having an argument with. This is not to say that Wilde's ideas are baseless and arbitrary. In fact they are exceedingly precise but Wilde leaves the onus of finding the precise conditions under which his crazy observations hold to the reader. The fact is that almost everything that anyone has ever said has some trace of truth in it. In the craziest of philosophies and the most juvenile of assertions, some part of reality, at some level of approximation, is always present (just like this generalization which I just made). But it isn't worth anything if the existence of this truth is merely an artifact of chance. I have long maintained that intent is more important than action. It's often the only difference between juvenile and brilliant art. While the end forms might be exactly the same, juvenile art creates itself whereas great art is a well thought out and precise expression. And this is why Wilde is special. He manages to say things like 'Those who are faithful know only the trivial side of love; it is the faithless who know love's tragedies,' or 'I love acting. It is so much more real than life.' or 'Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect; simply a confession of failure,' and one is left wondering under which conditions these statements might be true, and in doing so realizes that in some corner of his world view, there lay lingering a little thought which, after years of social conditioning, had become invulnerable to questioning. Another support upon which one has built up his shaky understanding crumbles, a few more cracks develop elsewhere, and in some sense, this destruction leaves one more alive than before.

"One evening during the Solvay Conference, some of the younger members stayed behind in the lounge of the hotel. This group included Wolfgang Pauli and myself, and was soon afterward joined by Paul Dirac. One of us said: "Einstein keeps talking about God: what are we to make of that? It is extremely difficult to imagine that a scientist like Einstein should have such strong ties with a religious tradition."

"Not so much Einstein as Max Planck," someone objected. "From some of Planck's utterances it would seem that he sees no contradiction between religion and science, indeed that he believes the two are perfectly compatible."

I was asked what I knew of Planck's views on the subject, and what I thought myself. I had spoken to Planck on only a few occasions, mostly about physics and not about general questions, but I was acquainted with some of Planck's close friends, who had told me a great deal about his attitude.

"I assume," I must have replied, "that Planck considers religion and science compatible because, in his view, they refer to quite distinct facets of reality. Science deals with the objective, material world. It invites us to make accurate statements about objective reality and to grasp its interconnections. Religion, on the other hand, deals with the world of values. It considers what ought to be or what we ought to do, not what is. In science we are concerned to discover what is true or false; in religion with what is good or evil, noble or base. Science is the basis of technology, religion the basis of ethics. In short, the conflict between the two, which has been raging since the eighteenth century, seems founded on a misunderstanding, or, more precisely, on a confusion of the images and parables of religion with scientific statements. Needless to say, the result makes no sense at all. This view, which I know so well from my parents, associates the two realms with the objective and subjective aspects of the world respectively. Science is, so to speak, the manner in which we confront, in which we argue about, the objective side of reality. Religious faith, on the other hand, is the expression of the subjective decisions that help us choose the standards by which we propose to act and live. Admittedly, we generally make these decisions in accordance with the attitudes of the group to which we belong, be it our family, nation, or culture. Our decisions are strongly influenced by educational and environmental factors, but in the final analysis they are subjective and hence not governed by the 'true or false' criterion. Max Planck, if I understand him rightly, has used this freedom and come down squarely on the side of the Christian tradition. His thoughts and actions, particularly as they affect his personal relationships, fit perfectly into the framework of this tradition, and no one will respect him the less for it. As far as he is concerned, therefore, the two realms—the objective and the subjective facets of the world—are quite separate, but I must confess that I myself do not feel altogether happy about this separation. I doubt whether human societies can live with so sharp a distinction between knowledge and faith."

Wolfgang shared my concern. "It's all bound to end in tears," he said. "At the dawn of religion, all the knowledge of a particular community fitted into a spiritual framework, based largely on religious values and ideas. The spiritual framework itself had to be within the grasp of the simplest member of the community, even if its parables and images conveyed no more than the vaguest hint as to their underlying values and ideas. But if he himself is to live by these values, the average man has to be convinced that the spiritual framework embraces the entire wisdom of his society. For 'believing' does not to him mean 'taking for granted,' but rather 'trusting in the guidance' of accepted values. That is why society is in such danger whenever fresh knowledge threatens to explode the old spiritual forms. The complete separation of knowledge and faith can at best be an emergency measure, afford some temporary relief. In western culture, for instance, we may well reach the point in the not too distant future where the parables and images of the old religions will have lost their persuasive force even for the average person; when that happens, I am afraid that all the old ethics will collapse like a house of cards and that unimaginable horrors will be perpetrated. In brief, I cannot really endorse Planck's philosophy, even if it is logically valid and even though I respect the human attitudes to which it gives rise.

"Einstein's conception is closer to mine. His God is somehow involved in the immutable laws of nature. Einstein has a feeling for the central order of things. He can detect it in the simplicity of natural laws. We may take it that he felt this simplicity very strongly and directly during his discovery of the theory of relativity. Admittedly, this is a far cry from the contents of religion. I don't believe Einstein is tied to any religious tradition, and I rather think the idea of a personal God is entirely foreign to him. But as far as [Einstein] he is concerned there is no split between science and religion: the central order is part of the subjective as well as the objective realm, and this strikes me as being a far better starting point.

"A starting point for what?" I asked. "If you consider man's attitude to the central order a purely personal matter, then you may agree with Einstein's view, but then you must also concede that nothing at all follows from this view."

"Perhaps it does," Wolfgang replied. "The development of science during the past two centuries has certainly changed man's thinking, even outside the Christian West. Hence it matters quite a bit what physicists think. And it was precisely the idea of an objective world running its course in time and space according to strict causal laws that produced a sharp clash between science and the spiritual formulations of the various religions. If science goes beyond this strict view—and it has done just that with relativity theory and is likely to go even further with quantum theory—then the relationship between science and the contents religions try to express must change once again. Perhaps science, by revealing the existence of new relationships during the past thirty years, may have lent our thought much greater depth. The concept of complementarity, for instance, which Niels Bohr considers so crucial to the interpretation of quantum theory, was by no means unknown to philosophers, even if they did not express it so succinctly. However, its very appearance in the exact sciences has constituted a decisive change: the idea of material objects that are completely independent of the manner in which we observe them proved to be nothing but an abstract extrapolation, something that has no counterpart in nature. In Asiatic philosophy and Eastern religions we find the complementary idea of a pure subject of knowledge, one that confronts no object. This idea, too, will prove an abstract extrapolation, corresponding to no spiritual or mental reality. If we think about the wider context, we may in the future be forced to keep a middle course between these extremes, perhaps the one charted by Bohr's complementarity concept. Any science that adapts itself to this form of thinking will not only be more tolerant of the different forms of religion, but, having a wider overall view, may also contribute to the world of values."

Paul Dirac had joined us in the meantime. He [Paul Dirac] had only just turned twenty-five, and had little time for tolerance. "I don't know why we are talking about religion," he objected. "If we are honest—and scientists have to be—we must admit that religion is a jumble of false assertions, with no basis in reality. The very idea of God is a product of the human imagination. It is quite understandable why primitive people, who were so much more exposed to the overpowering forces of nature than we are today, should have personified these forces in fear and trembling. But nowadays, when we understand so many natural processes, we have no need for such solutions. I can't for the life of me see how the postulate of an Almighty God helps us in any way. What I do see is that this assumption leads to such unproductive questions as why God allows so much misery and injustice, the exploitation of the poor by the rich and all the other horrors He might have prevented. If religion is still being taught, it is by no means because its ideas still convince us, but simply because some of us want to keep the lower classes quiet. Quiet people are much easier to govern than clamorous and dissatisfied ones. They are also much easier to exploit. Religion is a kind of opium that allows a nation to lull itself into wishful dreams and so forget the injustices that are being perpetrated against the people. Hence the close alliance between those two great political forces, the State and the Church. Both need the illusion that a kindly God rewards—in heaven if not on earth—all those who have not risen up against injustice, who have done their duty quietly and uncomplainingly. That is precisely why the honest assertion that God is a mere product of the human imagination is branded as the worst of all mortal sins."

"You are simply judging religion by its political abuses," I objected, "and since most things in this world can be abused—even the Communist ideology which you recently propounded—all such judgments are inadmissible. After all, there will always be human societies, and these must find a common language in which they can speak about life and death, and about the wider context in which their lives are set. The spiritual forms that have developed historically out of this search for a common language must have had a great persuasive force—how else could so many people have lived by them for so many centuries? Religion can't be dismissed so simply as all that. But perhaps you are drawn to another religion, such as the old Chinese, in which the idea of a personal God does not occur?"

"I dislike religious myths on principle," Dirac replied, "if only because the myths of the different religions contradict one another. After all, it was purely by chance that I was born in Europe and not in Asia, and that is surely no criterion for judging what is true or what I ought to believe. And I can only believe what is true. As for right action, I can deduce it by reason alone from the situation in which I find myself: I live in society with others, to whom, in principle, I must grant the same rights I claim for myself. I must simply try to strike a fair balance; no more can be asked of me. All this talk about God's will, about sin and repentance, about a world beyond by which we must direct our lives, only serves to disguise the sober truth. Belief in God merely encourages us to think that God wills us to submit to a higher force, and it is this idea which helps to preserve social structures that may have been perfectly good in their day but no longer fit the modern world. All your talk of a wider context and the like strikes me as quite unacceptable. Life, when all is said and done, is just like science: we come up against difficulties and have to solve them. And we can never solve more than one difficulty at a time; your wider context is nothing but a mental superstructure added a posteriori."

And so the discussion continued, and we were all of us surprised to notice that Wolfgang was keeping so silent. He would pull a long face or smile rather maliciously from time to time, but he said nothing. In the end, we had to ask him to tell us what he thought. He seemed a little surprised and then said: "Well, our friend Dirac, too, has a religion, and its guiding principle is: 'There is no God and Dirac is His prophet.'" We all laughed, including Dirac, and this brought our evening in the hotel lounge to a close."

I am not saying that the coastal regions of the progressive part of the society are more rational compared to the religious midwest. They have their own concrete beliefs and they also view scientific thought (which, differentiated from mystical thought, is the only form of rational thought) with a cross-eyed skepticism. Their new age delusions are as amusing as the idea of a God who keeps a constant eye on you. They might be having different assumptions but their failing is the same - that their assumptions are final. Anyway, in a country which is segregated in so many different groups of people who have their beliefs sacred, I am amused that the one thing that all of them are deeply skeptical towards is the thing that made the country great in the first place. It is not really science because it is too narrow a term but a disposition towards inquiry. For a country which is seen as the beacon modernity, which must necessarily be accompanied by a welcoming attitude towards change, so many of its people cling on to their provincial notions. Is it true of all societies? Am I being too harsh on America? I don't know...