A promiscuous minority

Not a large chunk of the global population has AIDS, or is a transmitter of the virus. Yet, the threat of the spread of the AIDS virus is a global concern. That’s because the AIDS virus spreads mainly through sexual contact. And sex is something we all engage in.

According to data from international AIDS research (surveyed and released by agencies from the developed world), Africa alone is not a concentration of the AIDS virus. It’s the Third World in general. Besides Africa (and there, there seems to be a higher concentration in the south of the continent), countries like India, China, Thailand and Myanmar are in precarious stages of launching AIDS epidemics.

Of course, it’s not everyone in the Third World who is responsible for spreading the AIDS virus. Just a promiscuous minority of the population.

Apparently, studies of sexual behaviour of people in the Third World show that a small portion of the population – prostitutes, and truck drivers and migrant workers who patronise them – are responsible for the spread of the AIDS virus. This lifestyle of rampant promiscuity seems to be commonplace in poor countries, and has been driving the spread of AIDS.

Culturally, in the Third World, although a married woman’s fidelity is well-guarded, her husband often strays, having sex with multiple partners (such as prostitutes). This increases the chances of AIDS infection and transmission, including the possibility of the men infecting their wives. Since Islamic cultures allow multiple wives for a man, this introduces a multiplier effect in the spread of the AIDS infection.

Moreover, most people in the Third World either do not have access to condoms, or are not educated enough to follow the practice of using condoms during sex, or are not allowed by their religion or customs to use preventive methods during sex. This further enhances the possibilities of infection and transmission of the AIDS virus.

Add to this list the number of women raped by soldiers (infected with the AIDS virus) during wars and civil wars, typically in Africa, and you have another source of AIDS transmission.

Anyway, by now you must have got the basic drift of this post. That, when it comes to spreading the AIDS virus, and perhaps influencing human evolution in the Third World this millennium, it’s a minority of promiscuous men who are responsible.

Conspiracy and denial

Why Africa? Why, of all the places on this planet, was Africa alone afflicted with the AIDS virus? Why was Africa its only source, now that we know that the AIDS virus has spread across the globe?

No one knows for sure. But conspiracy theories have done their time in order to answer these questions.

One conspiracy theory suggests the CIA’s involvement. That, during the Cold War (a period between World War II and the early nineties), the CIA had targeted Black Africans and infected them with the AIDS virus, surreptitiously, through vaccination campaigns. What had the Cold War – i.e. political tension between the United States and the (former) Soviet Union – to do with Black Africans in Africa? I’m not sure, but some say the CIA was evil enough to have done the damage.

Another theory suggests the involvement of the South African secret service. That, during Apartheid (coincidentally, the same period as the Cold War), the South African secret service targeted Blacks and infected them with the AIDS virus. This conspiracy theory seems to make some sense as, during Apartheid, there was a systematic ethnic separation of the Blacks from the Whites by the South African government. The theory may hold water because the South African secret service was known to have committed many an evil deed during Apartheid.

Whether these conspiracies are true, no one knows for sure. And, as you can guess, both the CIA and the South African secret service have denied charges against them.

Perhaps there are other theories we don’t know about. But there does seem to be a more accepted theory regarding the spread of the AIDS virus.

This theory involves the promiscuous nature of the African population. That, the AIDS virus was – and still is – spread through what are called ‘core transmitters’ in the sex trade: prostitutes, and the truck drivers and migrant workers who patronised them. What’s more, according to Malcolm Gladwell’s book ‘The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make A Big Difference’, this ‘core transmitters’ theory in spreading the AIDS virus seems to be true not just in dark Africa, but also in the more civilised Western world.

Of course, most African leaders have denied the ‘AIDS-virus-spread-through-core-transmitters’ theory as another Western conspiracy against Black Africans. But medical data does suggest that the AIDS virus is spread through unsafe sex. Whatever be the case, it can’t be denied that the threat of AIDS to our evolution is a real one.

Africa and the human evolution

When we talk of human evolution, we talk of our ancestors migrating from Africa to Europe some 100,000 years ago. Everything we are today happened from that instance; if ‘instance’ is the term we can use to label that epic moment on our human evolutionary timeline.

This ought to be a cause for celebration, if it weren’t for another instance on our evolutionary timeline when a similar migration took place from Africa to Europe, and other parts of the world. This time, the humans carried the AIDS virus with them.

Nobody is really sure when that specific instance really began. But we all know that, because of that instance, we have a crisis on our hands today. Even if you live in places far off from Africa, the rate at which the AIDS virus is transmitted and spreads across migrating populations, it won’t be long before it catches up with you.

For some strange reason, the source of the virus seems to be Africa. Scientists and doctors have identified the virus in a species of monkeys in Africa. But what they can’t explain is how the AIDS virus jumped from monkeys to humans; or, when did it jump and why. What scientists and doctors can neither explain is why the AIDS virus was unheard of before the 1980s; or, how and why it reached epidemic proportions thereafter.

Is this a call for alarm? It sure is. According to an UNAIDS December 2006 report, 25 million Africans are HIV-positive, 2.1 million die from AIDS every year, and 2.8 million are newly infected each year.

Do we even care?

It’s interesting to note how the evolution of the human species, with an eye on the future, is a much-talked-about topic in the developed world. Even in India, I can walk into a bookstore and find several books on evolutionary biology by Western scientists, which is almost insignificant compared to the endless information I can get on the Internet… once again, all of it from, and on, Western scientists.

However, I can’t find any information on the future of the human population in the Third World, apart from volumes of population data, which seems to be growing by the day.

This makes me wonder if the evolution of the human species is of any concern in the Third World. Considering the facts that (a) the Third World contains 2 out of every 3 inhabitants of this planet Earth, and (b) much of this population is suffering from poverty, disease and illiteracy, my guess would be that the evolution of the human species is a top-of-mind topic for Third World governments and scientists.

And yet, when I search for information on this topic, I draw a complete blank. Not even an iota of thought from the Third World on what our future is going to be. When I asked a few friends, they (along with me) couldn’t name a single evolutionary biologist in India. When we talked of genetics, we could talk of genetically-modified food and crops. And, in a connected field, we thought of professor Jagadish Chandra Bose and his experiments with plants (he proved that plants responded to stimuli) some 80 years ago.

But, zero thoughts on the future of the human species! Living in India, amongst 1.2 billion people, I found this ignorance mind-boggling. Whatever we remembered were things we had read by Western scientists in books and in the media, or seen on TV on Discovery Channel or National Geographic or BBC World. Nothing Indian came to our minds.

Perhaps we, Indians, will not die out of starvation (though many farmers and peasants still are). Perhaps we’ll battle it out with all the diseases and eradicate them as the West has done (though AIDS is a looming threat in India at the moment). Perhaps, soon, all Indians will be literate, educated, economically well-placed and enjoying a comfortable lifestyle. Perhaps, that’s achievable in the next 20 or 200 years.

What about our evolution from the perspective of the next 2,000 or 5,000 years? Do we even care?

Why Steve Jones has his fingers crossed

“Of course what’s happened is there’s been an enormous amount of evolution in the general sense since the earliest modern humans, but it hasn’t been biological evolution; it’s been social and cultural evolution. We’re the creature that’s evolved not in our genes but in our mind, and I think that’s what makes us genuinely unique. We do of course share 98.8% of our DNA with chimps, everybody knows that, but we’re not 98.8% chimp, we’re 100% human.”

– Steve Jones, Professor of Genetics, University College London, in a ‘Truth Will Out’ (an Open University & BBC project) interview.

Like most evolutionary biologists and geneticists, Professor Steve Jones is an avid follower of Charles Darwin. In 1999, Prof Jones had written a book called ‘Almost Like A Whale’ (released in the US, a little too literally perhaps, as ‘Darwin’s Ghost’), where he had explained various Darwinian concepts on evolution. Naturally, ‘natural selection’ had taken center-stage in his book… as, I guess, Darwin would have expected.

In ‘Almost Like A Whale’, Prof Jones had actually taken chunks of text and examples from Darwin’s own seminal work, ‘The Origin of Species’ (perhaps that explains the US desire for naturally selecting their title), mixing them up with his own writing and modern-day examples of evolution and technology. In doing so, Prof Jones had accepted a lot of criticism from his detractors, but for a layman like me, who hadn’t read Darwin’s original work, ‘Almost Like A Whale’ made the theory of evolution more interesting.

However, what’s important about Prof Steve Jones is his strong stand against the ‘creationists’ of Christian faith (he had once given a no-nonsense presentation on ‘why creationism is wrong and evolution is right’ at The Royal Society of Edinburgh) and his belief that human evolution, from the perspective of genetic improvement through natural selection in the developed world, may have come to an end… or is, at least, slowing down. Is this good or bad? What does it mean?

Here’s what Prof Jones says in the same ‘Truth Will Out’ interview I quoted from earlier:

“All animals to some extent construct their environment, in that they choose to live where they feel comfortable. However, we can do it much better than anything else because we can alter the environment so we’re comfortable in all kinds of places. By virtue of that we’ve managed, at least in the developed world, to put to one side the challenges which most animals have to face. Many of us now live to the end of our biological lives, as long as we possibly could live, and that’s really very rare. I do think though there’s a severe danger of optimism. We are living absolutely on a knife edge – we can be comfortable for a long time, but it’s a very risky thing to be.

I mean, everybody’s heard about the AIDS epidemic and it’s probably more severe than most people realise, it’s really a large part of the human species is now going through the testing fire of natural selection, a Darwinian crucible. People are becoming infected with this illness, some of them have genes which render them able to deal with it, some can’t, those with the appropriate genes will pass them on, and that’s very much evolution by natural selection. Now, in the West we’re persuading ourselves that that’s not going to happen to us. I’m afraid I’m less optimistic, it may not be the AIDS virus because we understand that, but it may be something else. So when I say that evolution has stopped, I have my fingers crossed. It’s stopped for now.”

The best it’s going to get

Here’s a thought:

“…human populations are now being constantly mixed, again producing a blending that blocks evolutionary change. This increased mixing can be gauged by calculating the number of miles between a person's birthplace and his or her partner’s, then between their parents’ birthplaces, and finally, between their grandparents’.

In virtually every case, you will find that the number of miles drops dramatically the more that you head back into the past. Now people are going to universities and colleges where they meet and marry people from other continents. A generation ago, men and women rarely mated with anyone from a different town or city. Hence, the blending of our genes which will soon produce a uniformly brown-skinned population.”

The above paragraphs are from a 2002 Observer article, titled ‘Is human evolution finally over?’, by Robin McKie, commenting on the future that awaits us all.

“However,” adds McKie quickly to his comment, “such arguments affect only the Western world – where food, hygiene and medical advances are keeping virtually every member of society alive and able to pass on their genes. In the developing world, no such protection exists.”

In the article about human evolution (in the Western world), Robin McKie explores some of the points of view expressed by scientists.

One, according to Professor Steve Jones of University College London, this is the best it’s going to get. Human evolution has, apparently, reached stagnation. “Things have simply stopped getting better, or worse, for our species.”

Another, by Professor Chris Stringer, of the Natural History Museum, London, states, “You simply cannot predict evolutionary events… Who knows where we are headed?”

Still one more, from biologist Christopher Wills of the University of California, San Diego, argues, “There is a premium on sharpness of mind and the ability to accumulate money. Such people tend to have more children and have a better chance of survival.”

“In other words,” clarifies McKie, “intellect – the defining characteristic of our species – is still driving our evolution.”

In the end, writes McKie, “Some scientists believe humans are becoming less brainy and more neurotic; others see signs of growing intelligence and decreasing robustness, while some, like Jones, see evidence of us having reached a standstill. All base their arguments on the same tenets of natural selection.”

So, where does that leave us? And, who can tell what evolutionary changes will dominate the developing world?

[Citation: ‘Is human evolution finally over?’, Robin McKie, Observer, 3 February 2002, Guardian Unlimited archive.]

As good as Gould

We often use cultural stereotypes in everyday conversations to make a point. Say, for instance, when using a commonplace concept like ‘bigger is better’, meaning a bigger size is a symbol of dominance, when describing social or political or economic superiority. We use such concepts even from an evolutionary point of view, suggesting that the bigger we are, the better able we are in fighting for food and mates. After all, human society is a living proof of that, right?

Not so, said (the late) paleontologist and evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, Harvard professor, curator for invertebrate paleontology at Harvard University’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, and author of such famous books as ‘The Panda’s Thumb’, ‘The Mismeasure of Man’ and ‘The Flamingo’s Smile’. To Professor Gould, who passed away in 2002, the notion of cultural stereotypes had a completely different meaning.

Since he took a somewhat macro view of life on our planet – a perspective that looked at millions of years and a thousand times as many life forms – Professor Gould believed that ‘bigger is better’ is not only incorrect, it is in fact a prejudicial view that humans flaunted to honour themselves. To prove his point, he used to give the example of bacteria which is far superior to humans in terms of biochemical diversity or potential environments in which it can survive.

From my reading about him and his books, what I value most about Professor Gould is his fairness in recognising, and evaluating, all life forms on our planet equally. A quality so few of us have.

In a Biography magazine interview with Curt Schleier in March 1998, Stephen Jay Gould had this to say: “After all, there are about a million named species of animals, of which humans are only one. There are only 4,000 species of mammals. There are almost a million species of insects. We’re just not a very prominent group. We’ve had a very great impact on the planet, but you can’t confuse impact with the status of an organism.”

[Citation: Curt Schleier, “Stephen Jay Gould: Was it Survival of the Luckiest?” Biography magazine, March 1998.]

Nature, nurture

Even as I write this blog post, biologists, neuroscientists, psychologists, sociologists, religious leaders, parents and others across the globe argue to establish their points of view on gender differences and why they occur. Some provide biological explanations of human behaviour; some propose cultural stereotyping; some talk about evolutionary programming as God’s will and testament.

Whatever the real reasons may be, I can’t deny the fact that men and women are different. That, when it comes to men and women, and boys and girls, their abilities, their responses to everyday stimuli, and the applications of their bodies and minds differ from one another according to their genders.

It’s still a mystery to me if the reason women have a nurturing nature is because they learn to play with dolls as girls earlier in life. Or, the reason men take to fast cars and spaceships is because, as boys, they grow up playing with toys which they keep throwing around their rooms or playgrounds or at each other. Not to mention the fact that boys and rough play is as common as girls and tenderness.

There are, of course, undeniable natural biological differences between the genders. After all, in any given population, on an average, men are taller, built heavier and more powerful (in, say, throwing a rock, or lifting heavier loads, or running faster) than women. I guess these abilities naturally define some of the job roles that men and women take up in any society.

I also believe we are defined by our environment and our upbringing (and, not by nature alone). In that order, cultural stereotyping does define many gender roles in our society. Which means, thinking and speaking positively, nurturing certain abilities in us can prepare us for many job roles which have, traditionally, been attributed to a specific gender… and break the myths associated with cultural stereotyping.

An example of this would be space travel, a domain which had been exclusive to men as they were believed to possess ‘the right stuff’ but has now welcomed women astronauts like Sally Ride (first American woman in space, 1983) and, more recently, Sunita Williams. It’s interesting to note here that the Russians had broken this myth of stereotyping way back in 1963 when they had sent Valentina Tereshkova on a space flight aboard Vostok 1. So, perhaps, nurturing can make a difference we are normally unaware of.

Regardless of our beliefs, the nature versus nurture debate still continues. I remember reading somewhere that internationally-renowned paleontologist and evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould had always despaired over the question of nature versus nurture. Professor Gould believed that biology and environment are so inextricably linked that such debates were meaningless.

Gender in the brain

There are fewer women physicists or architects or neurosurgeons in the world than their male counterparts. And, women chess grandmasters or video-game fanatics are hard to come by. Why is it so? Well, according to research, one reason is that male and female brains differ genetically.

According to a Discover Magazine article (‘He Thinks, She Thinks’) I had referred in my previous post, the human brain functions differently for men and women. For instance, while men have greater ability in focusing intently on work and tuning out distractions (ideal for winning at chess), women are more capable than men in handling languages and at verbal and memory tasks.

Although this may explain aptitudes in specific professions that men and women excel in, genetic coding in the brain is not the only reason for gender bias or stereotypes. According to psychologists and social scientists, environmental – i.e. societal and cultural – coding is as important as our genetic make-up. In fact, our culture actually sensitises us to certain belief systems which reappear at the workplace.

Consider, for instance, belief systems which we have all grown up with: ‘a woman’s place is at home’ or ‘men are better at maths and science than women’. Or, take the matter which was commented upon in one of my earlier posts: women losing out in job negotiations due to their non-aggressive nature. These belief systems actually affect our behaviour and performance even in benign situations.

Here’s a case in point as discussed in an article, ‘Think Again: Men and Women Share Cognitive Skills’ from www.psychologymatters.org:

“In a 1999 study, Steven Spencer and colleagues reported that merely telling women that a math test usually shows gender differences hurt their performance. This phenomenon of “stereotype threat” occurs when people believe they will be evaluated based on societal stereotypes about their particular group. In the study, the researchers gave a math test to men and women after telling half the women that the test had shown gender differences, and telling the rest that it found none. Women who expected gender differences did significantly worse than men. Those who were told there was no gender disparity performed equally to men. What's more, the experiment was conducted with women who were top performers in math.

Because “stereotype threat” affected women even when the researchers said the test showed no gender differences – still flagging the possibility -- Spencer et al. believe that people may be sensitized even when a stereotype is mentioned in a benign context.”

The moral of the story is, wherever these belief systems exist, and are predominant, we tend to, automatically, go on the defensive. Particularly, in situations in which we are being evaluated: job interviews, appraisals, school and college exams, or the sports field. Sometimes, we are so sensitised by these belief systems that, although untrue, we prefer to conform to these systems than to challenge them. It is as if our brains are hardwired to perform in a predicated manner.

Gender differences

“Like many-handed Hindu goddesses, women are better jugglers (in my experience), sweeping through their lives performing several tasks at once, while men seemingly do things sequentially—a division of labor that certainly prevails in our household.”
– Linda Marsa, in her article, ‘He Thinks, She Thinks’, Discover Magazine, July 2007

Genders differ – not just physiologically, but mentally and emotionally as well. This, as you can guess, is not a profound statement by me; but, rather, a reflection of all the scientific research that is available and my experiences in life. While reading up on gender differences in the workplace, earlier this month, I came across an article on the Internet from Discover Magazine which deals with the issue of gender differences from a scientific perspective.

The article, ‘He Thinks, She Thinks’ by Linda Marsa says, for instance, “men process their strong emotions differently from women and tend to act out and take action…” Ms Marsa, then, goes on to examine why this is so. Apparently, “findings offer tantalizing hints that even gender behavior differences once attributed solely to nurture—women are more emotionally attuned, while men are more physically aggressive—stem in part from variations in our neural circuitry.”

I quote from the article:

“The brain is divided into two hemispheres that play different roles in perception and behavior. The right side is relatively more involved with visual and spatial control, while the left is the seat of language. There is evidence that the male brain uses either one hemisphere or the other and relies on specialized brain regions when performing a task. Women, meanwhile, call on both hemispheres regardless of the task, resulting in greater communication between the two; they also enlist more brain regions to process information. When at rest, male minds appear to be more attuned to the “external world,” while there may be a “differential tilt toward the internal world” in female brains, says Larry Cahill, a neurobiologist at the University of California at Irvine.”

Got all that? Why not read the entire article online on Discover Magazine?

Threat of the gender stereotype

Some of my working women friends have told me that their experience in business and the corporate world has not been only about performing in a competitive environment. They believed that there certainly is discrimination in the workplace, leading to differential treatment of men and women with equal (or similar) abilities.

They also believed that there are gender differences in preferences for job roles, leading to selection of specific jobs, and even occupations, for women. They have gone as far as to tell me that women, possessing abilities equal to men, have different expectations from the job and their ability to perform in the job (compared to men).

Did this mean women have lower expectations from their jobs and their careers? If so, did this mean women are, perhaps unconsciously, creating an image for themselves of being less able than their male counterparts? And, if this is true, did this mean that, once again perhaps unconsciously, women are creating a stereotype for themselves in business and the corporate world?

If the answer to these questions is a resounding ‘yes’, then it is likely that this gender stereotype will create its own pressure on women and, in turn, interfere with their performance at work. What’s worse, this threat of the gender stereotype is likely to give men an advantage over women… thereby, increasing the gender differences at the workplace.

Women lack aggression

Although, in India, we have had a woman Prime Minister and now have a woman President, high-ranking positions in the political, academic, business and corporate worlds have usually been held by men. If you feel India is a little old-fashioned in distributing career opportunities to women non-equally, you’re probably right. But then, the rest of the world isn’t that far ahead of us. All across the world, gender differences prevail in all sorts of job roles and positions, not just in the high-ranking ones.

Why is this so? Well, discrimination against women is one reason that comes to mind. Then, as it so happens in the wide world, there are preferences for human capital of a specific gender for certain job roles. Perhaps this, too, is discrimination as there is a bias in favour of men… resulting in the proverbial gender gap in earnings (mentioned in my earlier posts). Connected to this thought is another: that women may be less competitive than men. Or, women may be less effective than men in competitive environments.

Could this be true? My experience tells me it is. That women, at least in India, are less competitive than men. Unlike men, women lack aggression, which is an important component of performance in a competitive environment. By ‘aggression’, I don’t mean hostile behaviour; but, rather, a propensity to perform at an enhanced level in order to win in a mixed-gender competitive environment. The ‘mixed-gender competitive environment’ is critical here as, I’ve found, women to be aggressively competitive in the company of other women.

If this is true, then it is indeed an interesting phenomenon. The fact that women can be aggressive per se, but not so when competing against men, is really an eye-opener. Because, then, the adage ‘women lack aggression’ is really a matter of belief, and has nothing whatsoever to do with their ability or skill or talent. It means women choose to use non-aggression as a behavioral strategy in a mixed-gender competitive environment, forfeiting their credentials, their job opportunities and their careers. And, in turn, limiting their chances of success (against men).

The question is, could this be classified as a gender stereotype?

Unmasking manly men

Last year, Robin Ely of Harvard Business School and Debra Meyerson of Stanford University co-authored a working paper, ‘Unmasking Manly Men: The Organizational Reconstruction of Male Identity’. The paper, according to a Harvard Business School Working Knowledge published interview, ‘not only explores how organizations influence the way men enact their gender, but also looks at how “organizational features might encourage people to resist enacting those stereotypes” (quote from Robin Ely).’

Here’s an excerpt from an interview of Professor Robin Ely by Sarah Jane Gilbert, discussing the research behind and the point of view of ‘Unmasking Manly Men’:

Sarah Jane Gilbert: How do you define masculine identity and what led you to study this topic?

Robin Ely: We define masculine identity as the sense a man makes of himself as a man, which develops in the course of his interactions with others. A man encounters—and learns to anticipate—others' expectations of him as a man; he responds, others react, and through this back-and-forth, he comes to see and present himself in particular ways. Such interactions do not occur ex nihilo, but are shaped by culturally available ideologies about what it means to be a man. Hence, men's masculine identity (like women's feminine identity) is a profoundly social and cultural phenomenon.

As organizational scholars, we were interested in organizations as social and cultural contexts that shape how men make sense of themselves as men—the stories they tell themselves about what it means to be male—and in the effect this sense-making has on how they behave at work. Much research on gender in organizations documents how men and women differ on a variety of dimensions, from leadership style to negotiation skills to work values, but neglects the organizational features that underlie such differences.

This body of research runs the risk of reifying differences, of making them seem natural. If study after study reports findings that align with stereotypes and does not address why, then these differences—in temperament, values, attitudes, and behaviors—take on a determinative quality. In a culture that readily promotes gender essentialism—the belief that sex differences are natural—stereotypes provide a default attribution for women's lack of progress in the public sphere of work, making it difficult to expose and undermine the social and cultural bases of inequality.

We were interested in generating theory about the contribution of organizations to the etiology of sex differences in behavior, cognition, and emotion at work. Specifically, we wanted to understand how organizational features, such as work practices and norms, encourage people to think, feel, and behave in a manner that is consistent with traditional sex-role stereotypes, but also how organizational features might encourage people to resist enacting those stereotypes.

From this perspective, both masculine and feminine gender identity are interesting to study, but to study men and masculinity was especially intriguing because so often the world presumes that only women have a gender. By studying men and masculinity, we were able to highlight that men too have a gender and to examine how organizations influence the way men enact their gender.

For those of you interested in unmasking manly men, read the full interview here.

[Citation: ‘Manly Men, Oil Platforms, and Breaking Stereotypes’, Sarah Jane Gilbert, Harvard Business School Working Knowledge, 27 November 2006]

A man's world

The other day, while a lady friend of mine was driving me around Bangalore, a car driven by a man suddenly cut in and almost pushed us off the road. Naturally, we were angry; but, being civilised folks, we let it pass. However, the incident remained on our minds for a while.

My friend explained to me that, as a woman driver, she has often experienced the ignominy of being cut in and squeezed into corners by male drivers. She said that men did that for two reasons: (a) it gave them some perverse pleasure, and (b) Indian men believed that driving a vehicle is a masculine task and not meant for women.

It was her second reason which had me wondering about the gender roles that are acted out around us, especially with reference to the jobs we hold. What she said was true – that there are some jobs meant only for men, and women are excluded from them. Though, in India, driving as solely a man’s job seems to have a cultural connotation to it, rather than a universal stereotyping.

Traditionally, hunting and soldiering were considered jobs for men alone. So were carpentry, blacksmithing and brick-laying or construction work. However, cultural nuances were always found, such as women labourers working at construction sites in India. Over the years, as newer job roles were defined, women were excluded from many of them. For instance, working on an oil rig is still considered to be solely in the male domain.

Nonetheless, when it came to white-collar work or executive job roles in the corporate world, more and more women were welcomed into the industry, with some women taking up important roles and positions once dominated by men. Or, so I thought. That’s why I was surprised to read an online article in last week’s issue of The Economist which reviewed two new books on corporate strategy… which is, well, at the cutting-edge of the corporate world.

The Economist article on books on corporate strategy, titled ‘Be firm, be flexible’, reviewed Michael E Raynor’s ‘The Strategy Paradox: Why Committing to Success Leads to Failure (and What to Do About It)’ and Chris Zook’s ‘Unstoppable: Finding Hidden Assets to Renew the Core and Fuel Profitable Growth’. Among other things, the article hinted that designing and developing corporate strategies is still considered a man’s job… though this view was likely to change.

Here’s an excerpt:

“The two books serve to emphasise the extent to which corporate strategy is man’s territory. Like golf, religion and the working breakfast, it seems set on excluding women from decision-making. Mr Zook’s bibliography lists 55 books written by men and one by a woman. Mr Raynor’s reference index contains the names of 80 men and not a single woman. Strategy today still assumes that corporate decision-makers are like generals on a battlefield, fighting in a sequential world where one step is “then” followed by another along a route clearly marked “either/or”. In reality, though, strategy is now a world more familiar to working mothers, where the inhabitants juggle many issues at once and rarely face clear-cut either/or situations.”

[Citation: ‘Be firm, be flexible’, Books & Arts, The Economist, 12 July 2007]

Career tips for women executives

As a corollary to yesterday’s post, I thought I’ll add a helping hand to anyone who may benefit from an article I read online on WSJ.com Career Journal while reading up stuff on the Internet before posting on my blog.

The article, ‘Four Negotiation Tips For Women Executives’, by Lee E Miller and Jessica Miller, goes back a couple of years – and is, perhaps, a little Western going by Indian sentiments – but it is worth a read by both women and male executives who wish to give their careers a fillip.

You can find the WSJ.com Career Journal article here.

Men make more money than women

Some of my women executive friends complain that they don’t get paid as well as their male counterparts do. They say that women aren’t good negotiators of (their own) compensation packages during job interviews because they lack the aggression men have. In the process, they compromise on their earnings while putting in the same effort at work.

This thought is perhaps true as (besides also being suggested by a fellow blogger in a recent comment on my blog) it seems to resonate faithfully in the largest of the ‘equal employment opportunity’ markets in the world: the United States of America.

Almost a year ago, an article in CNNMoney.com commented on this very fact. The article, by Jessica Seid, titled ‘10 Best-paid executives: They are all men’, presented a case of how, according to data collected from compensation surveys done in 2005 for Fortune magazine, the best-paid women executives in the US were paid almost a third of what the best-paid male executives received.

Here are some examples from that article:

In 2005, the top-earning woman executive was Safra Catz, president and CFO of Oracle. She took home $26.1 million in total compensation. Her CEO, Larry Ellison, took home $52.3 million (double of Catz’ pay).

The second-highest paid woman executive, Susan Decker, CFO of Yahoo!, made $24.3 million. Her chairman and CEO, Terry Semel, earned $56.8 million (more than double of Decker’s earnings).

Compared to the two best-paid women executives, Catz and Decker, the highest paid executive in the US in 2005 was Eugene Isenberg, CEO of Nabors Industries, taking home $71.4 million. The next was Ray Irani, CEO of Occidental Petroleum, who made $70 million.

Why is there such a striking difference in the compensations of top women and men executives? According to the CNNMoney.com article:

“All through the pipeline women leaders aren’t paid as well as men,” said Lois Joy, research director at Catalyst, a nonprofit that seeks to advance women in business. “And when you get to the CEO level, that same inequality is replicated.”

Indeed, the earnings of women in full-time management and professional jobs last year averaged 73 percent of men’s, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That gap can be explained to a large extent by nondiscriminatory factors, some studies have found, and are based on a division of labor in the home that relies more heavily on women than on men, according to Catalyst.

Women are not only less likely to work continuously during their lives, but responsibilities at home also influence their choice of job and type of employer, Catalyst said.

However, top-ranking woman executive Safra Catz’ pay was almost a third of top-ranking male executive Eugene Isenberg’s… a figure far less than the 73 percent difference the US Bureau of Labor Statistics reported. Did this mean the difference in compensation packages between women and men increases as the executives move up the corporate ladder?

The CNNMoney.com article suggested one reason (among a few) for this:

At lower levels, a lot of the disparity between executive men and women’s paychecks can be explained by the fact that women managed smaller companies and were less likely to be CEO, chair or company president, said Kevin Murphy, a professor at USC’s Marshall School of Business citing a paper by Marianne Bertrand & Kevin Hallock.

In fact, eight out of 10 of the highest-paid executives overall are CEOs, while only five of the 10 best-compensated women are chief executives.

It doesn’t sound like a very convincing premise to me, but there you have it. Whether you agree with it or not, reading the CNNMoney.com article might give you a better understanding – at least, an US perspective – of the differences in compensations between the two genders.

You can find the CNNMoney.com Jessica Seid article here.

Balancing

Coincidentally, and somewhat in line with my previous post on the different realities men and women experienced in their careers, the Sunday Times of India, in their Times Life! supplement last Sunday, released a story on successful working women in India and their perspectives on their work lives. The story, ‘Guilt-edged lives’, showcased several successful Indian businesswomen voicing, unanimously, the fact that a career means a balance between work, family and home.

The Times Life! story, which strangely does not credit its author(s) but acknowledges the Times News Network, quotes Sulajja Firodia Motwani, MD of Kinetic Engineering: “Being a working woman is a constant struggle, especially when it comes to kids. Even if you try and balance your work with your family and kids, there’s still an emotional pull.” The story centres on the fact that these successful businesswomen experience a feeling of guilt in having to manage work and family/home simultaneously, and are bold enough to acknowledge it publicly.

However, the story does not clearly state if the feeling of guilt is directed towards their work or their family/home, or both. Meaning, if they feel guilty for not being able to devote themselves 100 percent – and do justice – either to their work or to their family/home, or both. Judging the tone of the story, I’d say the guilt is directed towards their family/home. Which could mean that (and forgive me for generalising here) the woman is less guilty about not being able to devote 100 percent to her work/career.

To be fair, the story does go on to say (and I quote here from the story):

“At times the woman is torn between her professional aspirations and her familial roles. The solution seldom lies in choosing one over the other because for a woman it is important that she achieve success on both the home and work fronts, and not one at the expense of the other. Easily said, but takes some doing.”

Although all the women interviewed in the story mentioned their guilt, concern for and devotion to their children, interestingly, not a single woman mentioned her guilt, concern for and her devotion to her husband – leave alone her parents or her parents-in-law, which is normally how an Indian family is structured. I wonder if this is what the new and emerging Indian woman is all about. Perhaps, there’s a story in this as well.

And, what about the different realities (that men and women experienced in their careers) which I had talked about in my previous post? Well, the Times Life! story does touch upon that. It concludes with a quote from television host and VJ Mini Mathur: “A man simply cannot multitask the way we women can. If he’s making a film, he is only concentrating on that task, while I am expected to juggle several roles at once, and come up ace in each.”

[Citation: ‘Guilt-edged lives’, Times Life!, Sunday Times of India, Sunday, July 8, 2007]

Different realities

I often wonder if men and women experience careers in the same way. Do women executives go through the same exhilaration and/or despair as their male counterparts do? Or, do they experience and view their careers in a completely different way? To find out answers to these questions, I asked several women executive friends of mine about their work and their careers in the corporate world.

Though the sample size is small, my findings are quite interesting.

Women seem to have the same career aspirations as men do. However, somewhere along the line, while getting married and setting up a family, most of my women executive friends have had to drop out of their corporate careers. What they said was, had the marriage and family option not come their way, they would be as competitive as their male colleagues in building a career and moving up the corporate ladder.

For those who remained in the race, or for those who opted out during motherhood and rejoined later, sometimes in a consulting role rather than a full-time job, career aspirations were not reduced. What was reduced, however, was their ambition for taking up greater responsibilities and higher pressures at work which normally commensurate with higher designations.

In short, none of my women friends actually wanted to work harder (and smarter) to become CEOs of their companies, unlike their husbands or my other male corporate executive friends. The women simply said that their determination to chase a career to the top didn’t matter anymore once the children were born. That, their realities changed after marriage and motherhood. That, they had decided to make trade-offs and adopt different career strategies to balance work-life responsibilities.

When I quizzed my women executive friends on what strategies they had adopted in advancing their careers, they stated the same things as I and my male corporate executives often do: exceeding performance targets, demonstrating expertise, taking up high-visibility assignments, displaying excellence in communication and in people management.

As barriers to advancement, they stated lack of line experience, work/management styles which were different from organisational norms, differences (in thinking) with their bosses, and lack of understanding of organisational politics. Once again, these characteristics of corporate careers were similar to what their male colleagues experienced. However, this is where the similarities ended.

Women corporate executives experienced a host of challenges their male counterparts did not. Most of these were gender-based characteristics, and topping it all was an inhospitable corporate culture – a culture that generally favoured men. Next was gender stereotyping – women not being suitable for certain jobs, women not being as committed to work as men, women requiring handling with kid gloves, women being moody and emotional, women crying, etc. Next on the list was lower pay for women. Then, women not being included in (informal) male networks which left the women clueless about organisational decisions/behaviour in many situations.

It ended with women corporate executives lacking appropriate role models.

Are women employees better than men?

During a job interview, I was asked whether women employees were better than men. Honestly, I was caught off-guard. I took it as a trick question since my interviewers were both women. I answered that it was difficult to tell. That it depended on the job description and the responsibilities that came with the job. My interviewers weren’t satisfied with this and insisted on an answer: Were women employees better or worse than their male colleagues?

Put to the test, I was clearly uncomfortable, but suggested that I could, perhaps, state in what respects I considered women employees to be better than men. My interviewers accepted this proposition as a suitable alternative to their question and so I rattled off (a) women don’t bring their egos into their work like men do and pick fights with each other; (b) women are more compassionate than men in dealing with conflict; and (c) women can handle failure more maturely than men.

At that time I had no idea if my answer had hit the mark. But later, upon learning that I had been selected for the job, I met up with my interviewers and quizzed them. I just had to know whether my answer to that question had fit the response expected. Unfortunately, till this day, I’m still in the dark as to whether my answer was the right one. All I was told was that my answer was ‘sensible’ and that, though uncomfortable, I did not seem to be provoked by the question. That, temperament-wise, I was okay.

Although this news was heartening, the situation had me thinking: If we, men, aren’t comfortable answering questions about our women colleagues, how comfortable can we be in dealing with, or managing, them on a day-to-day basis? Or, as managers, in appraising them or mentoring them when the time comes? What’s more, I wondered, would women managers be as sensitive to women employees as male managers are expected to be?

That’s not all. Many more questions dogged my mind: Are women employees different from their male colleagues (in spite of my off-the-cuff answer at the interview)? Do women employees really bring anything special to the job which their male colleagues can’t, or don’t? Do women employees need different ways of managing or mentoring? And, of course, are women employees better than men?

Preserving the past is not easy

We don’t have to be historians or archaeologists or anthropologists or psychologists to know that the past has a grip on us. Almost everyone I know (including me) is troubled by it in some form or the other. Parental correction, sibling rivalry, lack of love, loss, humiliation, oppression… there’s no end to the list of human experiences and emotions which leave us scarred with memories of the past.

It’s not always negative or unhappy experiences that trouble us about the past. Memories of happy and exciting moments, too, have vice-like grips on our minds and our emotions, influencing our responses to the present. No matter how wonderful our pasts have been, it’s the absence of those happy moments that create a vacuum in our lives and cause pain in the present. I guess that’s what loss is all about.

Most of our contemporary fiction and films contain strong, and repeated, elements of memories (strangely, I can’t think of too many Classics which do that) to connect the fragmented narratives. Often, filmmakers and authors use devices such as dreams and photographs (Ingmar Bergman in ‘Wild Strawberries’), letters and diary (Amitav Ghosh in ‘The Hungry Tide’), audio tapes and video (Atom Egoyan in ‘Next of Kin’, ‘Family Viewing’, ‘Exotica’), or, simply, other shorter narratives in the form of recounting a version of the past (Milan Kundera in ‘Identity’).

What I found interesting in these films and novels is that they brought to surface a complication. These devices – images and words – far from being a solution to the filmmaker and the author in recording or narrating the past, actually ran aground when their recordings and narratives disagreed with the actual (authentic) recollections of memories of the persons involved… sometimes catching them by surprise.

Gilles Deleuze, French philosopher, whose treatises on literature, film and fine arts (besides philosophy) are exemplary, had once proclaimed that preserving the past on film is not easy. That, ‘filmic images’ compete with our ‘recollection images’ – i.e. our memories of events not captured on film or audio – making a ‘truthful’ narrative presentation on film rather difficult.

Milan Kundera, in his slim novel, ‘Identity’, seems to suggest that, when recollecting, particularly memories of loved ones, our own version of the past varies abominably, sometimes with drastic differences.

Piecing together a narrative

“I don’t understand you,” said Alice. “It’s dreadfully confusing!”
“That’s the effect of living backwards,” the Queen said kindly: “it always makes one a little giddy at first…”
“Living backwards!” Alice repeated in great astonishment. “I never heard of such a thing!”
“…but there’s one great advantage in it, that one’s memory works both ways.”
“I’m sure mine only works one way.” Alice remarked. “I can’t remember things before they happen.”
“It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards,” the Queen remarked.
(Lewis Carroll, ‘Through the Looking Glass’, Chapter 5 – Wool and Water)

Memories are an important part of our lives. They give us meaning, linking our past with our present, explaining our lives. They seldom come to us as one long story, beginning to end, explaining everything in one narrative; but appear in fragments, many a times triggered by cues from our daily lives which are unknown to us.

It is this mysterious, fragmented and episodic nature of memories that fascinates me. And, this piecing together of fragments to make a whole – a story, a picture, a life – is what attracts me to the art of storytelling. For, what purpose does my memory serve if not to help me tell my story – to come to terms with my own past, my history, my identity? I see it as something that explains who I am.

Coincidentally, I’m not alone here. When I look around, I see fiction and film inundated with memories – sometimes whole sequences of them, stories within stories, films within films, sometimes appearing repeatedly – filling in what has been denied to the reader/film-viewer, and sometimes even to the characters in the story or the film, explaining the raison d’etre of the longer and larger story that we read or view or experience.

This denial – and the subsequent, automatic filling in that memories do – is an interesting phenomenon. And, what better medium to represent it than film, visually. Although I’ve seen many films which deal with memories in an artistic cinematic manner, the film that comes first to my mind is Ingmar Bergman’s ‘Wild Strawberries’, a B&W film made some 50 years ago, in which the first memory of the protagonist’s, an aging professor’s, childhood was a field of wild strawberries.

Memories, along with identity and history and loss, form an important part of Atom Egoyan’s films (about which I have written in my previous post) as well. The film-viewer’s enjoyment of Egoyan’s films, from his first ‘Next of Kin’ in 1984 to his 2005 film ‘Where the Truth Lies’, is really achieved – completed and even climaxed – by piecing together fragments, much of it in the form of memories, from the various characters’ pasts to form one complete narrative in the end.

For both Bergman and Egoyan, this heavy reliance on memories leads to complex films. With Bergman, memories represent dream-like sequences which tend to freeze time; and in ‘Wild Strawberries’, for example, Bergman uses dreams and photographs to a great extent to piece the narrative together. With Egoyan, using metaphors (and media aids) such as videos, audio tapes, fairy tales, and even colour, memories fill time and space, providing a continuity which is necessary (for the film-viewer) to piece the narrative together.

Remembering

One of the most critical (literary) devices for the émigré author is the act of remembering. For, much of the content of immigrant writing is derived from memories… from material dug up from the author’s past and, perhaps, personal experience. Not all of it is literal, of course. An author’s keen observation plays an important part in recording facts and human behaviour, and then fictionalising them.

For instance, it’s unlikely that J M Coetzee had lost his leg in a bicycle accident to have written ‘Slow Man’; or that, Amitav Ghosh had waded through the swamps of the Sundarbans to chase river dolphins in West Bengal, India, to have written ‘The Hungry Tide’. But, using metaphors – in these cases, the inability to adjust (or re-adjust) to a new life after a loss or displacement or when fate deals a blow – émigré authors have a tendency to lure themselves into creating fiction based on personal experiences from, and memories of, their past.

Of course, most authors of fiction use similar devices, but the émigré author’s story has a haunting connection with the real past. Much of it is personal. Sometimes, it is difficult to separate the real from the fictional.

When the weaver of such émigré fiction is also a talented film director, then the stories seem more real. They take on a more solid hue, playing on the screens before us in words and pictures. One such film director, and a favourite of mine, who has adapted many of his films from his own émigré material is Atom Egoyan.

An Armenian-Canadian, Egoyan’s greatest achievement is his film ‘The Sweet Hereafter’ – a tale of adjustment (or re-adjustment) of lives when a bus-load of school children die in a road accident, soon followed by the arrival of a lawyer trying to compensate their loss with money… forcing them to remember their past lives, their loss and their grief.

While Nicole, the girl permanently crippled from the bus accident in ‘The Sweet Hereafter’, refuses to give in to the destructive forces of the lawsuit and changes the course of the lives of everyone in the film, Paul Rayment, J M Coetzee’s protagonist in ‘Slow Man’, crippled from the bicycle accident at the beginning of the novel, refuses to change the course of his life and live in its sorrow.

Such is the power of remembering, and Egoyan’s later film ‘Ararat’ thrives on it. ‘Ararat’ deals directly with the loss of a homeland and an identity that result from a historical and a political event – the Armenian Genocide, when the Turkish government overran the Armenians in 1915-18, killing one and a half million Armenians. But, that’s not all.

‘Ararat’ also deals with the coming to terms with this loss at a distant future (the present), where generations of émigré Armenians are trying to adjust (or re-adjust) to a new life in a new country. Egoyan seems to say that Armenians (like himself) cannot help but remember their past, with generations of Armenians intricately connected with it, weaving in this aspect of Armenian life through multiple characters and multiple layers in this complex film.

In ‘The Hungry Tide’, Amitav Ghosh presents a similar scenario, but in a far complex manner. He presents three generations of Bengalis from different walks of life, interconnected through their past and their Bengali identity, subtly touching upon an event from Bengal’s history – an uprising by homeless Bangladeshi refugees in Morichjhapi in the Sundarbans which was overrun by the West Bengal government in 1979, killing hundreds of Bangladeshi refugees.

While the significance of the historical event is central to Egoyan’s film, in Ghosh’s novel it is only incidental. But both, film and novel, raises a moral question of how we deal with history and our personal remembrances of it. Egoyan is unable to provide an answer to this question. Ghosh simply doesn’t offer one. So, we are left to form our own conclusions.

Intellectual allegiance

South African writer J M Coetzee, winner of two Booker Prizes, makes no bones about it. Soon after winning his Nobel Prize in 2003, Coetzee, in an interview with David Attwell, stated that his “intellectual allegiances are clearly European, not African.” And that, all his life, his writing has faithfully responded to this DNA. Even in Australia, where he moved a few years ago, Coetzee has maintained a European sentimentality while lamenting over his immigrant status, documenting it in his 2005 book ‘Slow Man’.

Kazuo Ishiguro, born Japanese but now living in England, and another Booker Prize winner, expresses similar views. In his January Magazine interview with Linda Richards (which I also cited in my previous post), Ishiguro stated, “That’s how I kind of branded myself right from the start: as somebody who didn’t know Japan deeply, writing in English whole books with only Japanese characters in. Trying to be part of the English literary scene like that.”

Like Ishiguro, who had moved to England as a child, Michael Ondaatje, also a Booker Prize winner, had moved to Canada from Sri Lanka at the age of eight and acquired Canadian citizenship along with his family. He has grown up in Canada and currently resides there with his Canadian family. Apart from a touch of Sri Lanka here and there (such as in ‘Running in the Family’ or in ‘Anil’s Ghost’), Ondaatje’s writing has always been peppered with an international flavour.

When I think about these authors, I often wonder how strong their intellectual allegiances are. I ask, how faithfully can these authors return to their pasts, to their countries of origin, in their novels and reproduce characters and scenes of native reality. Ishiguro seems to have a perfect answer for this: “it’s not really about describing a world that you know well and firsthand. It’s about describing stereotypes that exist in people’s heads all around the world and manipulating them engagingly.”

If this wasn’t enough, Coetzee gives another fascinating explanation. Speaking of Samuel Beckett (in the same Attwell interview I’ve mentioned earlier), Coetzee says: “Beckett was an Irishman and a European with no African connections at all. Yet in the hands of a dramatist of the sensitivity and skill of Athol Fugard, Beckett can be transplanted into South African surroundings in such a way that he seems almost native there. What does this show? That the history of the arts is a history of unceasing cross-fertilization across fences and boundaries.”

Wow. Can literature, or the arts, be any more delightful!

A new internationalism

In the last thirty years, the contemporary Indian novelist (writing in English) isn’t the only one who has prospered. There have been others, with similar émigré backgrounds, who have acquired fame outside their home countries through works of great literary importance in the late 20th century… with some of it spilling over to this very moment. In my previous post, I had named three such authors – J M Coetzee, Kazuo Ishiguro and Michael Ondaatje – but my favourite would really be Brian Moore.

Brian Moore, Irish by birth, is not the typical émigré novelist. He is white and from the United Kingdom. The reason I remember him today (he passed away in 1999) is because, to me, Moore displayed many of the attributes of an émigré novelist, leaving his home in Ireland and migrating to Canada while in his twenties. He roughed it out as a journalist for several years before turning to writing novels. All through his life, he was haunted by guilt, loss of faith, alienation and isolation and, from what I’ve read about him, he was never at home anywhere. Moore could have been a character in his own novels.

However, Moore did set the trend for the émigré novelist which Salman Rushdie, much later, defined so eloquently as the writer looking back and seeing life through a broken mirror. Or, the characters with broken lives coming from divided worlds, and with divided loyalties, which Coetzee, Ishiguro and Ondaatje (among others) created and described in their novels a quarter of a century later. As far as the English-language novel goes, I tend to think Brian Moore’s immigrant writing paved the way, and set the mood, for a new kind of international novel.

Rushdie was one of the first authors to ride on this road, but it was Ishiguro who actually voiced this sentiment – this new phenomenon – in the international literary world clearly. In an interview by Linda Richards in January Magazine, Ishiguro had said that, in the early eighties, there was “a great hunger for this kind of new internationalism.” That, “publishers in London and literary critics and journalists in London suddenly wanted to discover a new generation of writers who would be quite different from your typical older generation of English writer.”

This new phenomenon clearly put aside (some of my favourite) English authors such as John Mortimer, Malcolm Bradbury, David Lodge and Angus Wilson, and introduced a new generation of authors who wrote about the world as they saw it – not as an Englishman, but through the multicultural eyes of an émigré. It introduced a cultural blend which only émigré writers writing in English could offer its readers, critics and publishers.

The focus automatically shifted to the post-colonial world – the Commonwealth for a start – for its bevy of writers. And the rest, I suppose, is literary history. This new generation of international writers went on to win the Booker, the Nobel and other literary prizes around the world… and adorn the bookshelves of millions of readers like you and me.

[Although Brian Moore had won several literary prizes in his life, he did not win the Booker. He was nominated for it thrice.]

On foreign land

It’s interesting to note that although many Indian authors writing in English live in the UK, the US and Canada, their stories are mostly about India. Typically, there are three themes that run through their stories:

One, stories in India about Indian life. Two, stories in India about Indian life where Indian immigrants return to India from their new home for a brief spell. And three, stories about Indian immigrants in their new home on foreign land.

This is true because of the authors’ familiarity with both cultures… and the histories and geographies of both countries. Without this background, it is difficult to accomplish their tasks as Indian writers telling the world about India. It actually enables writing of this immigrant kind. My guess is, these writers draw heavily upon both (a) their memories of their old countries and (b) their personal experiences of, and responses to, their new homes.

This qualification gives them an edge over India’s home-grown writers who depend entirely upon their Indian experience. Indian home-grown writers not only lack the magic of immigrant experience, but, because of their lack of knowledge of foreign land, the people there and their customs, they desperately fall short in their ability to relate to, and please, Western readers.

Western readers, in turn, are enamoured by Indian writing in English – particularly by the works of those writers who are able to showcase the best of both worlds.

Mind you, this is true not of Indian writing in English alone, but encompasses writers of other countries as well. By that, I mean writers who share the experience of the immigrant kind and, yet, are able to relate to readers of both countries, old and new. J M Coetzee (South Africa, Australia), Kazuo Ishiguro (Japan, the UK) and Michael Ondatjee (Sri Lanka, Canada and the world) are three names that come to mind immediately.

In doing so, they emerge as global writers whose writing appeals to a much larger global readership. They may live on foreign land for the moment, but their writing endears them to a much larger audience.

Look back

In one of my recent posts on the contemporary Indian novel, I had mentioned a point raised by Salman Rushdie. That of the tendency of Indian authors living outside India to look back at their old country with a sense of nostalgia, with “some sense of loss.” As expressed in their writing, this feeling seems to be common among all immigrant authors – ‘immigrant’ from the perspective of the new country – and is perhaps because they wish, as Rushdie suggests, “to reclaim” what they no longer have.

This may be true for Salman Rushdie, and more so for authors like Bharati Mukherjee, Anita Desai, Amitav Ghosh or Vikram Seth who were born and brought up in India, but I am surprised when people include V S Naipaul and Jhumpa Lahiri in this list of Indian authors. After all, to reclaim, you must possess it first; and neither Naipaul nor Lahiri were born, or ever lived, in India. So, when Naipaul and Lahiri “look back” what do they see? Do they see the India you and I live in? What is it that makes them “look back” and see India, a place they have never lived in, nor experienced the way you and I do everyday?

This reminds me of an interesting comment that Amitav Ghosh had made at the 2002 International Festival of Indian Literature at the Neemrana Fort Palace in Rajasthan, which I quote here from a February 2002 News India Times article ‘Two worlds of Indian writing meet, hesitantly’ by Anindita Ramaswamy:

“...Amitav Ghosh, who is equally at home in New York or Kolkata, told IANS that he sees himself clearly as an Indian writer. “I think an Indian writer is one who is willing to be called an Indian writer. For example, Naipaul, who has never lived in India nor has written much about India, I am sure feels that he is an Indian writer.” Ghosh said that the definition of Indianness surfaces more prominently when one is abroad.”

Mr Ghosh, I am an ardent fan of yours, but I cannot agree with you here entirely. In fact, I’m not even sure if you are 100% sure of what you are saying. Having been an immigrant myself, I can confirm that the ‘consciousness of being Indian’ surfaces when one is in a foreign land. But, to include in it people who have never been Indian is a fallacy. I believe Mr Naipaul’s writing is a product of his imagination and his skill. I applaud him for that. I cannot call him an Indian writer.

How strange

If you have read my previous posts on the contemporary Indian novel, you would have got the feeling that it is one which is necessarily written in English. That, the contemporary Indian novel is not written in one of India’s 22-odd nationally-accepted vernacular languages, and then translated into English. No, it is clearly written and published in the English language. And, most likely, it is published outside India.

Not only that, there is a great chance that it may be, later, translated into European languages like French, German, Spanish, Portuguese or several other languages around the world. But, it is not likely to be translated into any one of India’s vernacular languages. It is likely to remain as a published work for, perhaps, 10% of India’s English language novel reading population.

I have often wondered how strange this is. How strange it is to have a body of work written in English, a language foreign to the greater population of India, represent India as its literature to the wider world. I have wondered how strange it is to have a body of work, supposedly from India, written by authors most of whom don’t even live in India. Or, at least, not anymore.

It’s not that these Indian authors are in exile like Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Milan Kundera. These Indian authors have left India and migrated to another country for better opportunities for themselves. Or, a few, like Jhumpa Lahiri or Pico Iyer or the ubiquitous V S Naipaul, have always lived away from India. Their only attribute (or qualificator, as someone once told me) is Indian parentage.

Yet, today, these authors represent my country and me to the world at large. I find this strange. I find this strange when I consider the huge body (perhaps I should call it treasure) of Indian literature, written in India’s own vernacular languages, which is a truer representation of life in India, and yet, which is being overlooked by the literary world.

And so, I ask myself, to what extent does this contemporary Indian novel have the right to represent me and my life in India... and be called Indian literature.

The contemporary Indian novel – IV

I don’t understand it. In spite of V S Naipaul not having any good things to say about India, we are eager to embrace him as an Indian author. In spite of V S Naipaul claiming his Nobel Prize as a citizen of Trinidad & Tobago and the United Kingdom, we are craving for his company as an Indian author. In spite of V S Naipaul not being India-born or having lived in India for a substantial period of time (for instance, like William Dalrymple), we are willing to include him in our fold as an Indian author.

What is it with us Indians? Are we so much in need of talent and recognition that we have to borrow from the world outside – even from those who clearly distinguish themselves as not being Indian, or not being an Indian author? If we were to go by V S Naipaul’s own comments on the Hindi film as ‘not reflecting reality’ and ‘concealing the truth’, are we not indulging in exactly that same thing when we welcome him as an Indian author?

It’s strange that the authors who are recognised by the international literary world as Indian authors are the ones who don’t stay in India. They are the ones whose notions of India, as recorded in their writing, reflect an India which she is not. Or, perhaps has not been for many years. Writing from the UK or the US or Canada, these writers are creating a picture of India which is imaginary. They are creating an Indian identity which bears little resemblance to the reality. And yet, the whole world is accepting it as the truth.

I remember Salman Rushdie bringing up this point many years ago in a bit of non-fiction ‘The Eye of the Beholder: Indian Writing in English’ for the Commonwealth Institute. Rushdie suggested that the portrayal of India by Indian authors writing in English may be warped, skewed and distorted. He mentioned the habit of ‘looking back’ that Indian authors writing in English irrevocably practised. According to Rushdie,

“…exiles or emigrants or expatriates, are haunted by some sense of loss, some urge to reclaim, to look back, even at the risk of being mutated into pillars of salt. But if we do look back, we must also do so in the knowledge — which gives rise to profound uncertainties — that our physical alienation from India almost inevitably means that we will not be capable of reclaiming precisely the thing that was lost; that we will, in short, create fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands, Indias of the mind.”

But, besides me, and maybe a line-up of India’s own regional language authors who feel the need to assert themselves to clear the picture, no one is complaining. After all, writing is all about readership. And, the strength of the readership for the contemporary Indian novel lies with the Western world.

The contemporary Indian novel – III

Salman Rushdie is the biggest name in contemporary Indian literature. Think of the Indian novel, or Indian writing in English, and ‘Rushdie’ is the first name that comes to mind. There were writers before him and there are those who are his contemporaries, but Salman Rushdie’s fame is unmatched. He is the authority; he is the measure.

By the time Rushdie achieved fame with ‘Midnight’s Children’, winning the Booker Prize in 1981, authors like V S Naipaul, Bharati Mukerjee, Anita Desai and Gita Mehta had already created a presence for the contemporary Indian novel in English in international literary circles. But, for some magical reason, Rushdie’s ‘Midnight’s Children’ became a landmark; his fame instant.

As you know, Rushdie went on to win many awards and greater fame, in spite of stirring up strong emotions within the Islamic community, for which he almost had to pay with his life. But, what is remarkable in all this is that, since Rushdie’s ‘Midnight’s Children’, there has been no looking back for the contemporary Indian novel in English. It has become a genre by itself, dominating the Indian novel at home, and spurring the growth of literature in entire South Asia.

Since then, many authors of Indian origin writing novels in English have achieved fame, winning international awards and recognition in their own right. I have mentioned some of these names in my previous post, but there are many more. However, there is a common thread that runs through them all. Almost all of them reside outside India, having migrated to the UK or the US since the sixties. Rushdie, for instance, has lived outside India (shuffling between the UK and the US) ever since the Beatles won the world over with their music.

This aspect of living outside India and yet writing about India is what makes up the profile of the contemporary Indian novelist. And, it is this profile which is responsible for a recurrent theme in their writing: that of the Indian immigrant experience. Not only do many novels follow this theme, with reminiscences of the old country, even in novels written solely on India, there is an Indian immigrant planted somewhere in the story. It is as if the novel has been written through the eyes of someone living outside India… which, I suppose, suits the international audience perfectly.

This explains the ready acceptance of the contemporary Indian novel by the literary world outside India. It explains the recognition by the literary and reading audience, and the resultant fame for the authors. The question is, would these authors of Indian origin have achieved equal fame if they had not migrated from India to write and publish their novels in the international market? Going by the facts of the matter, there does seem to be a pattern for success. And, for the moment, that success seems to be outside India.

Note:

If you have read my previous post, you would have found two anomalies in the list of authors I have provided. One, an exclusion: V S Naipaul. And the other, an inclusion: Bapsi Sidhwa.

Naipaul is supposed to be of Indian extraction since his forefathers were from Gorakpur (I think), in India. However, Naipaul was born in Trinidad & Tobago and has lived in the UK for many years. Since he has received all this awards and fame, including the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001, as a citizen of Trinidad & Tobago and the United Kingdom, I do not consider him to be an Indian author.

On the other hand, I believe Bapsi Sidhwa to be more of an Indian author than Naipaul. Sidhwa, although of Pakistani origin and nationality, and now living in the US, has written several novels and stories on India. Some of these stories have also been made into films (by Deepa Mehta) like ‘Earth’ and ‘Water’ for both Indian and international audiences.

The contemporary Indian novel – II

From the point of view of Indian writing in English, if there is anything unique or outstanding about the contemporary Indian novel, then, according to me, it is its achievement of making India accessible to the West. Therein lies its distinction, and fame. You see, in the last thirty years or so, the contemporary Indian novel has garnered a fabulous Western audience for itself, simply because it has been written for that audience in mind.

Mind you, this could not have been achieved from the inside – that is, within India, by India’s ‘home-grown’ writers (Arundhati Roy may be an exception here, but she came into the picture when the path had already been set) – as, to do so, the writer had to have been a person of the West as well. So, the Indian novel had no choice but to depend on the works of those writers who left India for a foreign land, only to write about her from the outside, sharing their own personal experiences of India in their novels.

This included a plethora of writers living mainly in the UK and the US, and a few in Canada: Salman Rushdie, Bharati Mukerjee, Anita Desai, Bapsi Sidhwa, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Amitav Ghosh, Rohinton Mistry, Amit Chaudhuri, Vikram Seth, Vikram Chandra, Upamanyu Chatterjee, Sunetra Gupta, Jhumpa Lahiri, Kiran Desai… the list grows longer by the year. These are just a few of the names; those which appear in lists over and over. The important thing is, the West embraced them all, honouring them with awards and recognition from all corners of the literary world.

I’m not sure why it all happened in the way it did, but my theory is that the pop culture of the late sixties and the early seventies had something to do with it. The West was restless, looking for its soul, and turning to India for spiritual enlightenment. The word ‘karma’ was on people’s lips (though very few knew what it meant), along with a few other words and phrases like ‘guru’ and ‘Hare Krishna’ and ‘mantra’ and even ‘Ravi Shankar’. When the Beatles had their ‘satsang’ with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, India became the talk of the London and New York elite.

The West wanted to know more about India, and yet there was very little to be found. India was full of scholars but nobody could put into words what India’s mysticism was about. Until 1979, when Gita Mehta published her book, ‘Karma Cola: Marketing the Mystic East’, talking about this very subject. Gita Mehta was the perfect writer for the job, being Indian but with residence in the UK and the US, opening up India to the Western world (and, in the process, shattering a few myths as well).

This phenomenon, probably, also explained why Gita Mehta’s and (soon to be followed by the more heroic) Salman Rushdie’s writing became more popular with the West than R K Narayan’s. R K Narayan, writing from India about the simplicity of Indian rural life and the purity of the Indian heart, was not quite the ‘global writer’ that the Western literary world demanded from India. After all, the view of India that the West wanted had to be through a Western lens… so the West could understand it all.

The contemporary Indian novel – I

There are a couple of things we need to keep in mind. First, there is the Indian novel written by Indian writers living in India and writing in their own vernacular language. Second, there is the Indian novel in English written by writers of Indian origin, and even citizenship, writing from almost anywhere in the world.

It is the second category – the Indian novel in English – which has been accepted by the literary world at large as the contemporary Indian novel.

This disappoints me, as I feel a great deal of literary achievement is being ignored by the world. But then, it’s the Indian novel in English which is responsible for highlighting India’s literary prowess and establishing India on the literary world map. As you may well know, in the last thirty years or so, many writers of the Indian novel in English have received international acclaim.

Here again, I am disappointed, as most of these writers of Indian origin do not, or no longer, live in India. They are described in various ways by the literary world: as ‘of Indian extraction’ such as V S Naipaul; or ‘British-Indian’ such as Salman Rushdie; or ‘citizen of India but with permanent residence in the United States’ such as Kiran Desai. These are three Man Booker Prize winners from the past 30 years or so (Naipaul 1971, Rushdie 1981, Desai 2006), of whom India is rather proud.

So, perhaps, the definition of an Indian novelist – i.e. in the sphere of the Indian novel being written in English – has little to do with nationality and political status of the writers, but more to do with their heritage, their family background and the content of their novels. And this fact, sort of, defines – or, is defined by – their race, their ethnicity and their culture. Not to mention the content of their writing, which is on India and about India.

Mind you, that’s not the end of the world for the Indian contemporary novel. There are ‘home-grown’ writers as well – those who are 100% Indian citizens, living in India (though a few may have passed away), and writing the Indian novel in English. I would say R K Narayan and Arundhati Roy (a Man Booker Prize winner, 1997) fit this description perfectly.

The breakthrough

In the last 30 years or so, the Indian novel has made a major breakthrough in world literature. It has found for itself a suitable position, much admired by international scholars and the international literati.

The breakthrough strategy, though rather late in coming (in my opinion) as the strategy should have been obvious to us much earlier, was simple: write in English. If you wish to find yourself a place in the world of literature dominated by the English language, then write in English. It was a sort of ‘if you can’t beat them, join them’ strategy, and it worked.

Today, we have recognition from the international community for the Indian novel and the substantial contribution that Indian authors make to world literature. Much of it has a colonial hang-up, of course, but I guess it can’t be avoided. After all, we have been under the British Rule for 300 odd years and have, most likely, been introduced to the novel by the British (see my previous post ‘The Indian Novel’).

Indian authors writing in English came forth with their work, establishing themselves, first, as an important part of the post-colonial South Asian diaspora and, second, in their own right, as creators of world-quality literature. In the past 30 years or so, there have been as many Indian writers of renown writing novels in English and winning international acclaim. They are far too many to be listed here, but a Google search would easily give you an idea of who they may be.

I’ve read many of their works, thoroughly enjoying the style of writing, the content and the significance that Indian novels have in an international forum, many a times cheering for the show of creativity and exuberance of the authors. And yet, that question still prevails in my mind: What is an Indian novel?

I’m sure the answer is not an easy one, considering the fact that the Indian novel’s evolution goes back a century and a half. However, for this post, if we limit our discussion to Indian authors writing in English, then there is an excellent article from the February/March 2000 issue of Boston Review which I would encourage you to read. It’s called ‘The Cult of Authenticity’ and is written by Vikram Chandra, an Indian author writing in English.

Here’s an excerpt from that article to mull over (the article is rather long):

“A friend told me about a meeting of the Delhi University syllabus revision committee, where they were trying to decide on the one Indo-Anglian novel that should be prescribed in the one course on modern Indian literature. My friend suggested Midnight’s Children, and she was shouted down. Salman Rushdie isn’t Indian, the majority of the professors asserted. Amitav Ghosh, however, was found to be sufficiently Indian, and so his Shadow Lines was accepted into the canon. The issue was decided not on the basis of the relative merits of the books, but on the perceived Indianness of the authors, and by implication, the degree of their assimilation by the West.”

Linguistic lines

How can the Indian novel do well in a world where the novel, and literature itself, is dominated by the English language? If it’s not English, then it’s French, Spanish, German or Russian. The world of literature favours the more popular languages of the larger cultural powers, with English having established itself as the world leader.

There are affinities too, like Latin American literature, a strategy that seems to be set firmly to woo readers from countries speaking the same language. In this case, it’s Spanish. There is still the rigour of translations, of course, but I can confidently say that, today, Latin American literature is growing in leaps and bounds, and will soon become a force to contend with.

The truth of the matter is that the world of literature is divided along linguistic lines, with the smaller cultures edged out by virtue of their languages being less popular than a few others. Few in number these languages may be, but their reach and their might are phenomenal.

With such polarisation, there is very little chance that a novel from India can get an edge in. Added to this, India’s own problem of twenty-two official languages (besides English) and five times as many dialects gives Indian literature a sort of provincial or local bias. Leading to the important question: what exactly is an Indian novel?

The Indian novel

As it happened in England, in India, too, the novel as a genre began in mid-nineteenth century. What was before the novel is difficult to classify, but somehow, not long after the Industrial Revolution, literature blossomed across the world, introducing readers to the long story in the form of the novel.

As a Bengali – i.e. a person from the state of West Bengal in Eastern India – and a student of storytelling, I find this intriguing. It’s baffling to learn that, in Bengali literature, there was no such thing as a novel prior to 1850.

Then suddenly, as if the literary dam had burst, a legion of novelists emerged in Bengal: Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, Sonjib Chandra Chattopadhyay, Taraknath Gangopadhyay, Ramesh Chandra Dutta, Rabindranath Tagore, Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay… and others.

Although the first Bengali novel is supposed to be ‘Alaler Ghorer Dulal’ (the author’s name escapes me now), most likely published in 1857, the year of the Sepoy Mutiny, the novel which is remembered most is ‘Durgesh Nondini’ written by Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay in 1865, the first of his 14 novels. This set the words flowing and the next 70 years were probably the most creative years in Bengali literature.

The Indian novel, in fact, developed all across India with Mayuram Vedanayakam Pillai’s ‘Prathapa Mudaliar Charithram’ written in Tamil in 1879, and O Chandumenon’s ‘Indulekha’ written in Malayalam in 1889 declared as two of the greatest novels from South India at that time.

The reasons for the beginning and the development of the Indian novel at this time are numerous. They include British influence and westernisation of India, the emergence of a middle class and a new Indian sensibility, a scientific temper which instigated improvements in various aspects of Indian life, and the fact that English novels were available in India. All, leading to a comment that the novel as a genre may have been imported into India, thanks to the British.

However, there is a claim staked by several literary historians that a work in Persian, ‘Nashtar’ by Hasan Shah, purported to have been written in 1790, is the first Indian novel in any Indian language. Apparently, it had remained unknown until an Urdu translation was published in 1893.

The Curtain

What is the novel’s raison d’etre? Can the novel help us understand reality, to define the boundaries and/or the relationship between fiction and reality? Or, as Milan Kundera suggests in his new book, ‘The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts’, help us see with new eyes? For, isn’t the novel’s tradition (and it’s true for fiction in general) as old as human culture, laying the path to a more progressive, revolutionary form?

In his March 2007 article, ‘The unbearable rightness of fiction’, in Salon.com, Gary Kamiya explains Kundera’s point why it is important for all novelists to understand the history and the form of the novel:

“Kundera’s point is that Western culture, including classical music and literature, has a definite history, which one must know not just to understand new works but, as a creator, to build on. If you’re a novelist writing in 2007 and you don’t know ‘Don Quixote’, ‘Tom Jones’, ‘Tristram Shandy’ and ‘The Castle’, you may still create a lasting work -- but you will do so only as a wild genius, not as a craftsman. And the history-obsessed Kundera has his doubts about untutored genius.”

Adding, “Kundera believes novelists must know the history of the form because if they don’t, they are likely to repeat fictional expeditions already undertaken -- for him, the ultimate aesthetic sin.”

But what about pioneer novelists like Cervantes and Rabelais who had no history of the novel to start with? Were they simply men of untutored genius? Were they not craftsmen as well?

Gary Kamiya goes on to write, “‘The Curtain’ reveals a lot about Kundera. Yet, ironically, it also helps us understand why his creative works, or those of any major writer, cannot be reduced to theory.” I agree.

Fuentes on Borges

“Borges remarked that a new reading of a book is also a new writing of that book. Stories are eternal only in that they are always being read, and that we the readers, we the plurality, over many times and spaces, we are the generators of meaning.”

[from Notes by Allen B. Ruch on ‘Jorge Luis Borges at 100: A Lecture by Carlos Fuentes’ – 18 October 1999, 92nd Street Y, New York, Unterberg Poetry Center]

The Novel

“The novelist’s ambition is not to do something better than his predecessors but to see what they did not see, say what they did not say.”
– Milan Kundera

Just like architecture and music, literature and its chief proponent, the novel, have evolved over the years to represent our culture. And, therefore, much of literary history is the history of the novel. The Western culture has been quick to attest this and a great deal is written about the history of the novel, with its beginnings in Europe.

The East, forever the reticent kin of the West, has kept a low profile in this matter, although its history and literature date back thousands of years before Western culture came to be known as Western culture. I have no doubt the East’s literary history is far richer than what the West can ever offer, but, sadly, there isn’t a great deal that one can read up today about literary history in the East, or in my country, India, for that matter.

So, for the layman in India, the books on literary history that can be found in the bookstores are those written by Western authors recording their own culture. For the novel, that means a journey of 400-odd years, covering three continents: Europe (including old Russia), America (mainly the United States), and Latin America.

Authors who are likely to come up for discussion would include Cervantes, Fielding, Balzac, Flaubert, Dickens, George Eliot, Hardy, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Kafka and Joyce (from Europe); Melville, Hawthorne, Henry James, Conrad, Faulkner and Hemingway (from America); Fuentes and García Márquez (from Latin America). There are many more, of course. The list is long.

In each work of the authors listed above, we’ll find a style unique to its period, perhaps even leading the novel out of its previous mode. For, the history of the novel is the history of its form, its tradition, its progress from one period to another, its understanding – and representation – of reality in the realm of the author’s imagination. All laid out before us in quaint cultural settings, with lively and idiosyncratic characters running through its pages.

Storms over the novel

“What good is the novel, the long story told in prose? Hegel called the contingent, the everyday, the mutable, "the prose of the world," as opposed to "the spiritual, the transcendent, the poetic." "Prosaic" can mean plain, ordinary, commonplace, even dull. Prose fiction, historians of the novel tell us, has had to struggle against the sense of being a second-rate genre. Heidegger said that "novelists squander ignobly the reader’s precious time." In late-eighteenth-century Britain, when large numbers of badly written popular novels were being published, "only when entertainment was combined with useful instruction might the novel escape charges of insignificance or depravity."

In pre-modern China, Japan, and Korea, the general word for fictional writing was xiaoshuo (in Chinese), meaning "trivial discourse." Socialist critics of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have accused the novel of bourgeois frivolity. By contrast, aestheticians of the novel, like Flaubert, proposed the ideal novel as "a book about nothing," or, like Joyce, as a game which would turn the everyday world into the most concentrated and highly designed prose possible. Moral writers of novels like George Eliot or D.H. Lawrence believed in the novel as the book of truth, teaching us how to live and understand our lives and those of others.”

The novel’s entanglement in "the prose of the world" can also be its justification and its pride. The novel’s virtue, it has often been argued, lies in its egalitarianism, its very commonplaceness. And the novel’s everydayness need not be an enemy to its aesthetic integrity. In his wise, deep, and witty essay on the novel, The Curtain, Milan Kundera, a follower of Flaubert in his critique and practice of the European novel, celebrates "the everyday" ("it is not merely ennui, pointlessness, repetition, triviality; it is beauty as well") while writing in praise of the novel's essential self-sufficiency:

"It...refuses to exist as illustration of an historical era, as description of a society, as defense of an ideology, and instead puts itself exclusively at the service of "what only the novel can say."


[Excerpt from ‘Storms Over the Novel’ by Hermione Lee, The New York Review of Books, Volume 54, Number 8 · May 10, 2007]

How to read a novel in 3 not-so-easy steps

STEP 1: Read the novel quickly, beginning to end.

STEP 2: Read the novel slowly, with concentration, paying attention to each and every detail of what’s written and how it’s written, making notes along the way.

Ask yourself if the novel entertained you; if you enjoyed reading it. Which characters did you like, or dislike? And why? Did the plot engage you? Were there discrepancies in the narration of the story, or in the characters? Did the setting seem appropriate? In which time period was the story set? Did the novel touch any specific emotions in you? Did you understand what the novel was about? What was the author’s point of view? Was there a message in the story which you would remember for a long time? Did the novel have a social, cultural, historical or political relevance?

Analyse your answers honestly. Don’t let your personal feelings or beliefs cloud your judgement about the story, or the author.

STEP 3: Read the novel in your own pace, reviewing and revising the notes you’ve made on your previous reading.

See if you have missed anything, or learnt something new. Try to pick up meaningful or relevant quotes and passages from the novel for discussion. Find out what you can about the author. If you can, compare the novel with the author’s other works, or works by other authors in the same genre or period.

Decide what is good or bad about the novel and the author, objectively. Only then will you be able to appreciate the true beauty of the novel.

These three not-so-easy steps in reading a novel were drilled into me by my English teacher: an aging lady with a hooked nose and thin lips, who seldom gave me good marks in English literature; though she never tired of encouraging me to read. I avoided her. I don’t remember ever following her advice.

It’s was much later, in my professional life, when I had to sift through volumes of data on consumers, brands, markets and economic indicators, did I realise the significance of her teaching.