You know what I had started to think? I had started to feel that I was beginning to lose the passion with which I used to approach literature. I had been reading good books by really accomplished writers and I had begun to like almost everything that I read, which made me think that perhaps that faculty for criticism which I thought I had was beginning to desert me. Reading a lot of good books can become a little boring just like life can be a little too perfect and a dessert can be a bit too sweet. It also lessens the appreciation that one has for a really good work of literature. But thanks to Murakami's 'Kafka on the shore', that latent hate that I reserved for sub-par literature was immediately fanned and I feel so much more alive now.

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!

It's a new year! And what better time to resume this sporadic trickle of posts which has fallen through the faucet of this forum for the last 6 years; gushing and ebullient in its infancy and seemingly wise and reserved now that 'I have been through the ropes'. I like, every now and then, to go back to the Archives tab and flip through the pages of personal reflections which stand as milestones in time, revealing the slow and unmistakable transformation that my personality has gone through. In these remnants from the past, I believe that I have a most fascinating and precious lens through which to view the often vague and hazy journey of one's own past but with the unusual brutality and certainty of the written word. All these years in words, all these personalities in thoughts - I treasure this collection more dearly than absolutely anything else.

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!

Looking back at the years spent in UCSD, one thing dawns clearer than any other. I have enjoyed the company and friendship of only those who explicitly offered neither brilliant insights into the grave facets of life nor any secret fountains of wisdom. I have come to despise small and big talk alike and I have ended up deriving all my understanding and enjoyment from what I would term trivial talk. And in some sense that is the most important conversation one can have. It pays heed, in one fell swoop, both to the absurdity of existence which is missed in serious discussions and to the simple joys of life which suffer such a debilitating end at the hands of small talk. Discussions which started with ridiculous topics and disintegrated into wild orgies of inanities, strewn with unspeakable political incorrectness and a lack of consideration for all that society holds dear. And yet those discussions were much more than just juvenile pleasures. They were sharp and intelligent and in their own twisted way reduced life and society of their phony garbs - something that no amount of serious deliberation can do because it is too mindful of hurting sentiments.

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.

We often take our own natures and predispositions to be more special, more peculiar than those which we ascribe, in an abstract sense, to others. And poisoned by this very affliction I find myself being affected by farewells in a way which to me is more nuanced than how I think other people get affected by them. But perhaps it's nothing more than my own introspective nature coupled with the fact that I have increasingly more amount of time now to think about things, something that I do not necessarily disapprove of.

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.

Richard Dawkins wrote his best known work, The Selfish Gene, in the late 70s and initiated a silent and powerful revolution in the field of evolutionary biology. This was much before when he went nuts and started introducing himself as a militant atheist, writing books with titles like The God Delusion. I personally never heard of anyone who stopped believing in God just because Dawkins told so. If God is a bad idea, which I think it is in a qualified sense, it will slowly be evolved out of the gene pool (or the meme pool to be exact.)

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!