On Muhammad Yunus's autobiography Banker To The Poor

Not many would dispute the claim that poverty - not AIDS, terrorism, or climate change - is the greatest problem before mankind today. After all, even if we are living in an age of unprecedented prosperity, more than one billion people, or one-sixth of humanity, still live below the poverty line, or on less than $1 a day.

But unlike those other issues, poverty has always been around with humanity, and so we are all to some extent inured to it - it is for most people a fact of life, as natual as the weather. And perhaps even the opening proposition of this essay leads to a misleading conclusion, for it suggests then that it is the responsibility of mankind, or at least the richer sections of mankind, to "solve" the problem of poverty through redistribution, charity, employment schemes, or development aid. And who should know of this propensity better than Indians? We are, after all, home to one third of the world's poor, and our politicians routinely come to power speaking the rhetoric of poverty alleviation. Indira Gandhi's rousing slogan Garibi hatao, which swept her to power in 1971, still resounds through the corridors of government today and informs our policy-making at every level.

The salutary argument of Banker to the Poor, the autobiography of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Mohammad Yunus, is that to emerge from the shackles of poverty the poor need access not so much to development aid or social welfare or skills training as capital. As Yunus has demonstrated in three decades of work in Bangladesh with his Grameen Bank, the idea that the poor are not credit-worthy because they have neither skills nor collateral is fallacious. The extent to which he has been successful is disputed by skeptics, but the fact that he has ushered in nothing short of an economic and social revolution is indisputable.

His autobiography recounts the steps by which he arrived at his thinking, and the progress of the micro-credit movement from a $27 loan made in 1976 - Grameen's disbursements came to over $600 million in 2005, and programmes replicating the Grameen model are in place now the world over. Yunus's philosophy of "grass-roots capitalism", and the specifics of how it involves both the individual and the community in a comprehensive vision, is one of the most essential advances made in our times on problems of economics that have been debated for hundreds of years, a fact acknowledged by the United Nations when it declared 2005 the International Year of Microcredit.

Returning to Bangladesh to teach economics in the seventies after completing his Ph.D in America, Yunus noted that the elegant theories of his education that he himself now propagated in the classroom seemed not to be working on the ground. Many of the desperately poor in his village, although capable of productive work, were caught up in the clutches of moneylenders, or else working for miniscule wages because, as Yunus points out, "profit is unashamedly biased towards capital".

These facts have confronted many an economist, but Yunus's achievement, backed by hundreds of committed workers, was to convince the poorest of the poor (many of them illiterate women in a society which treated them like second-class citizens) that they could be independent economic actors by borrowing small amounts of capital, and then to get them to pay back these debts. He shows that he managed this, paradoxically, by making it hard for the poor to borrow from Grameen. Each individual desirous of a loan had to approach the bank after forming a group, the members of which then acted as a peer-support system. Further, the repayment of the loans was not on a yearly but a weekly basis, a continuous rather than a deferred activity.

The poor are often overawed by money (many of the women to which Grameen issued loans had never handled money in their life) so Yunus went down to a scale at which even they could be comfortable. Grameen was also unusual in that it sanctioned loans without collateral, and that it gave no great importance to skills training. In Yunus's view, the poorest of the poor already have skills which they can utilize to break the strangehold of absolute poverty. In a table of activities supported by Grameen loans, amongst the most popular are paddy cultivation and paddy-husking, cow-rearing, weaving and cane-making, the purchase of rickshaws and sewing-machines.

Yunus emerges in these pages as a strong proponent of self-employment, which he sees as being given short thrift in traditional theories of economics. "Obviously self-employment has limits," he writes, "but in many cases it is the only solution to help the fate of those whom our economies refuse to hire and whom taxpayers do not want to carry on their shoulders." Yunus is also a critic of development aid and the welfare state, which inculcate in the individual a sense of dependence or natural entitlement. "Charity, like love, can be a prison," he declares.

The poor are poor not because they are untrained or illiterate, "but because they cannot retain the return of their labour," argues Yunus. "It is not work which saves the poor, but capital linked to work." By thinking of the poor as not creditworthy because they possess no collateral, banks, in his opinion, practice a kind of "financial apartheid". Micro-credit, in his view, uses the power of cash capital to liberate the potential of human capital. He reminds us that the etymological root of the word credit is "to believe, put trust in". This incisive and clear-headed autobiography should become an enduring part of the essential literature on poverty.

Here is Yunus's Nobel lecture, in which he asserts his belief in capitalism but argues against a now-standard interpretation of it based on the assumption "that entrepreneurs are one-dimensional human beings, who are dedicated to one mission in their business lives − to maximize profit". "This interpretation of capitalism," he argues, "insulates the entrepreneurs from all political, emotional, social, spiritual, environmental dimensions of their lives." And he has a good essay on globalization here, in which he contends that "we cannot cope with the problem of poverty within the orthodoxy of capitalism preached and practised today". Yunus's observations might be interpreted as proof that sometimes it is capitalism's most perceptive critics who are its best friends.

And here are two essays on a related theme by the economist William Easterly, "Why Doesn't Aid Work?" and "The Ideology of Development", and a good essay by Amartya Sen on Easterly's recent book The White Man's Burden.

And finally, a superb essay - the transcript of a lecture, actually - by James Q.Wilson, a writer I admire greatly: "The Morality of Capitalism".

Muhammad Yunus's new book Creating A World Without Poverty is published in America this week by the excellent imprint PublicAffairs Books.

And some other posts on autobiographies by Pervez Musharraf, Sasthi Brata, and Barack Obama.

[A shorter version of this piece appears today in Mint.]

On Daniel Kehlmann's Measuring The World

Many writers of fiction attempt on occasion to set their work a few decades back from the present, sometimes to recall the world of their childhood when their sense experience was sharpest, sometimes to explore on behalf of their readers the question of how we got here now from the place we were then, and sometimes just to relieve themselves from the pressures and risks of interpreting the contemporary world. The near past, then, is a place more familiar than unfamiliar.

But going further back in time that the recent past - into another age altogether, as does Orhan Pamuk in his great novel My Name Is Red, set in sixteenth-century Istanbul, or Kiran Nagarkar in his book Cuckold, set in the Rajput kingdom of Mewar around the same time - is a different matter altogether. Personal experience or the testimony of family members no longer counts for anything; a library is more useful than memory. Perhaps this is why works of fiction set in the distant past feature fictional recreations of actual historical personages - Mirabai in Nagarkar's book, Giacomo Casanova in Sandor Marai's Casanova in Bolzano. Such figures serve as a familiar anchor, as it were, in the ghostly world of distant time - they become representative of an entire age. Indeed there is a thrill in seeing them come alive, living in the moment, as they never can in history books or even biographies, which are obliged to see them through a different lens.

Daniel Kehlmann's Measuring The World, one of the unlikeliest bestsellers of this season, summons from relative obscurity two Germans of the early nineteenth century: the great naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt, whose studies of the natural life of Latin America were revolutionary in their time, and the mathematical genius Carl Friedrich Gauss, still spoken of today as perhaps the greatest mathematician since antiquity. Describing the efforts of these two men to measure the world - Humboldt on arduous journeys, Gauss from the comfort of his study - at a time when "things weren't yet used to being measured", Kehlman presents a study of the single-mindedness of scientific genius, leavened by the comedy of their family life and dealings with society.

The novel's lightness of tone is crucial, because it gives it two registers, rather than the single one available from a more dedicated historical reconstruction in which the narratorial voice subsumes itself to the characters and their environment. While Kehlman faithfully summons up period details and the specifics of the work of his protagonists (he has a doctorate on the work of Immanuel Kant, so he knows the territory), he does not historicise his language - his characters are shown thinking and speaking not in archaisms but in a contemporary idiom. This is a clever compromise. The novel's language thus is always skittering on the edge of comedy, a comedy that exploits the contrast of the infinite patience of the protagonists with the challenges of measuring the world, and their absolute puzzlement with the behaviour of other, normal human beings with modest intellectual capacities and varied wants.

Gauss, for instance, feels irritation with the fact that a superior spirit such as himself should be housed in such a sickly body, while his son Eugen should be bursting with health when he is only "a common or garden-variety creature". On another occasion the boy Gauss, who can compute equations in a flash, feels incredulity at how slowly people seem to think. "Sometimes he managed to accommodate himself to them, but then it became undendurable again." On his wedding night, as his hands slide over his bride's body, Gauss sees that "a sliver of moon appeared between the curtains, pale and watery, and he was ashamed to realize that in this very moment he suddenly understood how to make approximate corrections in mismeasurements of the trajectories of planets. He wished he could jot it down…." That image of Gauss, his fingers on skin and his eye on the moon, might serve as a précis of the novel's method.

The defining feature of a historical novel is its setting in time, and the question of time is given an added edge in Kehlman's book by the way his protagonists themselves feel the yoke of time on their backs. Gauss, for instance, is acutely conscious of how speedily civilization is progressing scientifically , and thinks it unjust that "you were born into a particular time and held prisoner there whether you wanted it or not". Readers will smile at this thought, for of course reading is one of the ways in which we can escape being held prisoner by time. Even as Kehlman's readers join him in looking backwards, his protagonists are looking forwards, to a day when everything about the world will be known, thanks in part to their researches.

Another of the novel's little ironies is that both Humboldt and Gauss have no time for art, and think it a frivolous pursuit, a distraction from the main business of life. Science is about fidelity to empirical truth, but artists remarkably "held deviation to be a strength". Humboldt is shown in one scene criticising novels in which the author ties his inventions "to the names of real historical personages". That the Humboldt who does so is himself a name tied to a historical personage in a novel is one of the many witty touches in this charming book.

Here is an essay by Kehlmann on the writing of historical fiction: "Out of this World". I am not sure if his remark that "As a German writer, I can only marvel at Latin American novels; unlike their authors, I can't just invent a beautiful woman who flies away while hanging up washing, or creatures that are half-man, half-snake" is meant seriously or as a sly barb.

And here is an old post, on Orhan Pamuk's My Name Is Red.

Coming up in July

I haven't quite worked out what fiction I'll be writing about next month, other than Naguib Mahfouz's just-released Karnak Café.

But there'll be pieces on some splendid new non-fiction, including:

An essay on Jawaharlal Nehru as a writer of English prose, on the occasion of the release of The Oxford India Nehru, an anthology of Nehru's best essays and speeches

Banker to the Poor, the autobiography of the Bangladeshi economist and 2006 Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus

Ryszard Kapuscinski's Travels With Herodotus

Rajiv Chandrasekaran's Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone

and possibly Rajmohan Gandhi's recent biography of Mahatma Gandhi

In Pragati

My recent piece in Mint on Guy Sorman's account of contemporary China The Year of the Rooster also appears today in the new issue of Pragati, the monthly magazine of The Indian National Interest.

On Simon Wilde's biography of Shane Warne

This piece appears today in Mint, and the rest of it is here.

Shane Warne is as Australian as they come—garrulous, plain-spoken, competitive, cocksure, cheerfully philistine—so one of the surprising aspects of his personality is his love for England. It is an affection that extends beyond the gullible figures of English batsmen, who set up Warne’s greatest successes, and extends to the fans, who love him as one of their own, the food and drink (Warne is a great guzzler of fizzy drinks and demolisher of chip butties), and even the county cricket scene.

It says something for Warne’s divided allegiances that, although he has retired from international and Australian domestic cricket, he still plays for Hampshire in England and proudly leads the team. The English media is just as devoted to Warne, with the broadsheets closely tracking his on-field deeds and the tabloids sniffing out every lurid detail of his off-the-pitch shenanigans. Even the two extant Warne biographies, of which Simon Wilde’s new book is one, are written by British journalists....

Other posts on cricket books and cricket: on Gideon Haigh's All Out, which has some matchless descriptions of Warne, on the best Indian cricket writing, and "Some thoughts on playing cricket at The Oval".

On Manjushree Thapa's Tilled Earth

Of the many rough divisions possible in the world of literature, one is the separation of writers of fiction into those who demonstrate sympathy with their characters, even flawed or inadequate ones, and those who manifest a kind of impatience with them and choose to view them through the lens of irony and satire. The talented Nepali writer Manjushree Thapa is no misanthrope, but the overwhelming mood of Tilled Earth, her first book of short stories and third book overall, is that of weariness shading into cynicism. Sometimes it is Thapa's characters who feel impatient with and dispirited by their circumstances, but just as often it is Thapa who swoops on how, in different ways, they either lack the courage to break their shackles or have sold out and retired into complacency.

Many of Thapa's characters are low or high-level government servants or else workers at NGOs - people who could have made a difference to what they know is a poor, developing country but who have succumbed instead to careerism or sheer apathy. The pressures of life and love lead her characters to experience the tension between tradition - the way of "families, friends, society", of caste hierarchies and unequal gender relations - and modernity, with its idea of the individual as sovereign over his or her own life, free to choose the course that seems best. Thapa's characters also sometimes betray what she has elsewhere called "small-nation thinking" - they feel they are bit-players in history, and often look over the border at India.

Unusually, Thapa shows a facility for both the long short story, or the form as it is traditionally practiced, and the short short story, which is the briefest of glimpses into the world of a character, a window opened up and then shuttered almost at once. Some of her shorts beautifully evoke an entire world in just one or two paragraphs. In "Solitaire", the aged government clerk Hit Bahadur Thapa, indifferent now to the goings-on in the world outside his room ("Democracy had come and gone and come again over the span of his career"), is shown having discovered the pleasures of playing solitaire on his office computer in the last year of his working life. And the ambitious and self-involved student Ramesh is shown riffling through a dozen career options in a fine story called - the title is long as the story is short - "The Secretary of the Student Union Makes a Career Choice".

In the best story of this collection, "The Buddha in the Earth-Touching Posture", a retired bureaucrat is shown travelling all by himself to Lumbini, the birthplace of the Buddha. The bureaucrat thinks of himself, as do many of his station, as a man apart from the masses, sage and rational while they are credulous and servile. Thapa's achievement is to show that there is an element of truth in his reflections. The bureaucrat has left his wife behind because she is "driven by passion, the kind who supplicates to every god" while for him the Buddha is indisputably a historical figure, a wise man iterating the need for reflection, not devotion.

At Lumbini he is irritated to find the tourist brochures full of historical inaccuracies which are swallowed by tourists, the various sites anointed with flowers and vermilion, and giant but soulless monasteries raised by various missions from around the world to make "a gaudy Buddhist wonderland". "How banal people are," he thinks, and Thapa allows us to register the sense in which this is true, but also the way in which the bureaucrat has cut himself off from the world. Here is the acute way in which the bureaucrat is shown reflecting on his marriage:

My marital life has not been atypical. My wife and I have shared the usual joys and given each other the usual sorrows, and have settled into a passionless partnership. Though she would never admit it, she probably likes the life I have given her more than the person I am. I do not mind this. I too find her company limited. We are not intellectual equals, merely co-owners of lives jointly led. We consult on matters relating to our sons, our house, our properties, but we do not share a joint vision.

"Though she would never admit it, she probably likes the life I have given her more than the person I am" - it is by the articulation of these subtle but unsettling distinctions that fiction derives its power. Note how this conclusion is so much more affecting because the bureaucrat has arrived at it by himself, instead of the writer making this judgment about the character.

Thapa is less sympathetic to her protagonists in a story called "The European Fling", which is about two middle-aged people, a Nepali woman and an American man, who meet in Europe for a fling. Sharada and Matt are both in thrall to radical ideas - that is what brought them together during their university days. But, meeting after several years, they find they have less patience with each other. Matt has turned vegan, and spends all his time in bookstores obsessing over various injustices. Sharada, meanwhile, is pursued by a handsome Tibetan youth, and feels a little odd to be flirting so shamelessly, even needily, with him when she is "a leading gender specialist". Thapa's irony here is crushing, but is when she leaves some channel of redemption open for her characters that Tilled Earth is most satisfying.

Manjushree Thapa's website is here. And here are two more pieces about contemporary Nepali literature: a piece of Samrat Upadhyay's Royal Ghosts, which I liked very much, and a long interview with Upadhyay.

[A shorter version of this piece appears today in Mint.]

On Christopher de Bellaigue's The Struggle For Iran

When George W.Bush declared in 2002 that there was an "axis of evil" threatening world peace and stability, what surprised most observers was the appearance of Iran as a part of a triad alongside Iraq and North Korea. After all, although its government was hostile to America, Iran showed no signs of becoming a rogue state, and its regime was in part democratically constituted. But Bush's belligerent rhetoric not only thrust the spotlight upon Iran internationally, it also, as the journalist Christopher de Bellaigue notes in his new book The Struggle For Iran, decisively altered the domestic political climate in Iran.

A reform movement of modest proportions, opening doors to greater social freedom for Iranian people, was quashed by the hardline clerics who run the country. In the presidential elections of 2005, a divided electorate ended up voting in the fire-breathing Islamist ideologue Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to replace the relatively moderate and liberal government of Mohammad Khatami. "Iran's pro-democracy movement," writes de Bellaigue, "could not survive in the atmosphere of protracted crisis that Bush helped create."

De Bellaigue's book, his second about Iran, builds upon and serves as a companion volume to the first, the widely acclaimed In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs (2005), an impressionistic account based on his travels around the country as a reporter. In his new book de Bellague, now a resident of Tehran and not just a traveller, is more carefully focussed on explaining Iran to the world, refuting misconceptions about the regime and its people and adding nuance to the broadbrush arguments made about the country around the world. Bringing together long essays originally published in journals like The New York Review of Books and the Guardian, The Struggle For Iran thoughtfully illuminates the politics, history, social life, art and cinema (Iran's best-known export to the world after oil) of one of the world's oldest civilizations.

Bellaigue's book often harks back to the most decisive moment in the history of modern Iran - indeed one of the towering events of the twentieth century - the Islamic Revolution of 1979, in which the corrupt and unpopular monarch Reza Pahlavi was toppled by the forces of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Khomeini and his followers inaugurated "the modern world's only clerical state", in which an unelected Supreme Leader chosen by the country's most influential clerics held power alongside a democratically elected president, himself chosen from amongst candidates vetted first by the council of clerics.

Although there was widespread support for the Revolution in its first decade (especially since Iran was fighting a damaging war with Iraq for most of the eighties), in recent times Iran's staunchly religious, censorious, and socially conservative establishment has seemed more and more out of touch with a vibrant society in which three-fourths of the population is under thirty. Even so, the Iranian state plays a directive role in every walk of life and controls over 60 per cent of the economy, its inefficiencies compensated for by booming inflows of petrodollars as world oil prices escalate.

The struggle for Iran, then, is a struggle between the hardline establishment, able to cock a snook at the world because of its oil resources and nuclear technology, and of moderate and liberal forces who now find themselves in disarray in Ahmadinejad's Iran. But Bellaigue cautions the reader against making the fallacy, implicit in the attitude of the Bush government, that if the present regime is somehow toppled, the path will be clear in Iran for a western-style liberal democracy.

Even Iran's most liberal politicians, he writes, do not go so far as to demand a secular democracy - for good or bad, faith will continue to play a role in the construction of the state. As the failed experiment in Iraq shows, democracy, while no doubt the best kind of political system, only stokes resentment and rebellion when imposed from above. If democracy has to successfully take root in Iran, the perceptive Iranian-American writer Reza Aslan has written, it must be "framed in recognizable terms, based on familiar ideologies, and rooted in indigenous values and traditions". As the historian Maria Misra, whose book on India Vishnu's Crowded Temple is out later this year, observes:

The history of post-colonial states shows that democracy is most successful where it has been generated, at least in part, by indigenous traditions. Democracy came to India not because the British selflessly introduced it: democracy succeeded precisely because it was associated with opposition to British imperialism. It was fought for by a popular movement led by Mahatma Gandhi - a figure who blended the traditional and the modern into a seamless, but recognisably Indian, political system.

Propaganda campaigns such as the one launched by the Bush government last year, which budgeted $75 million "to broadcast US radio and television programmes into Iran, help pay for Iranians to study in America and support pro-democracy groups inside the country" may actually prove to be counter-productive.

As in his previous book, de Bellaigue is alert to the voice of the people, soliciting the opinions of Iranians across classes and ideologies. Additionally, his work highlights the wonders of pre-Islamic Persian civilization, a period of history that the present regime understandably seeks to obscure. He has a beautiful essay on attending group classes on the Sufi poet Rumi (Rumi believed, he writes, that an observant person who is ignorant of Islam's spirit is "more dangerous than an irreligious person"). Elsewhere, he notes the irony that Iran still owns the finest collection of Western art outside of Europe and America, put together by the former Shah's wife, even as the establishment has for three decades inveighed on the corruption of Western culture. The fascinating diversity of thought and practice of a complex society in flux - a necessary antidote to simplistic axis-of-evil, us-versus-them thinking - is opened up by this sophisticated and elegant book.

Some chapters from de Bellaigue's book are available online: "Who Rules Iran?", which describes a visit to the seminary town of Qom; "Lifting The Veil", a lovely essay on the Islamic Republic's collection of Western art, and "The Spirit Moves In Tehran", on joining other Iranians in classes on Rumi.

And some other good essays on Iran's society and politics: "Aunt Kobra's Islamic Democracy", a very funny and insightful essay by Reza Aslan, "The View From Tehran", a piece by the prominent investigative journalist and democratic activist Akbar Ganji; "The Democrat", a thoughtful profile of the theologian and reformer Abdolkarim Soroush by Laura Secor; an excellent interview with the Iranian intellectual and film critic Hamid Dabashi by Ramona Koval ("India has historically been a far more important factor in culture and civilisation in the moral and intellectual radar of countries such as Iran, but the people never talk about a place like India because we are trapped inside the east-west, secular-religious kind of dichotomy"); "Iran: Let the democratic process work", a piece by Dabashi; "Ideas whose time has come", a conversation between Danny Postel and the Iranian philosopher Ramin Jahanbegloo; and a discussion on democracy and human rights in Iran in the aftermath of the Revolution with the scholar Ladan Boroumand ("But in revolutionary situations, each actor projects its fantasy onto the leadership. And because Khomeini was discreet about his real agenda each social actor could fantasise about what the Imam wanted for Iran, and joined the movement on the basis of that fantasy"). See also Boroumand's essay "Prospects for Democracy in Iran".

And for those wanting to know more about the gimlet-eyed schoolteacher-turned-president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Time magazine has a long interview with him here, and a superb photofeature here. Whatever his faults, Ahmadinejad is certainly not lacking in self-confidence - last year he sent President Bush an eight-page letter which begins, as if he was writing to none other than his granpa, "For sometime now I have been thinking..."

And some old pieces on Iranian films - "Hitchcock in Hijab" and "Anger in Tahmineh Milani's Two Women" - and writers - Hushang Golshiri and Houshang Moradi-Kermani.

[A shorter version of this piece appears today in Mint]

The scorn of the literary critic

I have the highest respect for the work of Adam Kirsch, and read him every week on the website of the New York Sun. But a recent piece by him attacking literary blogs on the Sun website ("The Scorn of the Literary Blog") seems to me so ill-informed and tackily written that I've left a long comment beneath it taking issue with some of the points he makes.

Kirsch has some good thoughts about what reviewing should be about ("The whole point of a review is to set one mind against another, and see what sparks fly. If the reviewer lacks an individual point of view, or struggles to repress it, there can be no intellectual friction, and therefore no interest or drama"), but then turns to literary blogs and makes several arguments for why they are a force for the bad.

One of the errors he makes is to assume that lots of writers and reviewers aren't also bloggers. If he'd accounted for this, he'd have seen that the blog-form allows for a different kind of literary criticism from that found in newspaper review sections, and wouldn't have made the slipshod arguments that he does ("bitesized commentary, which is all the blog form allows, is next to useless when it comes to talking about books").

It seems to me that Kirsch has fallen into the common trap of those writers who, working in the mainstream media and under some kind of editorial control, turn up their nose at what they feel is the say-what-you-like-and self-publish world of blogging. They are of course right to insist that bloggers should aspire towards higher standards (everybody should), but certainly wrong to assume that bloggers have no standards, or, even worse, that the form itself has no potential. It may have been true of the early days of the Internet, but now newspapers no longer have a monopoly on quality content online. It doesn't look like Kirsch has taken the time to look at - by whichever standard - the best of the literary weblogs out there, which are really what he should be comparing the newspaper book-review sections with if he wanted to be fair.

As someone who writes for the papers and my blog - mostly now for the papers - I know I couldn't do without this website. I've learnt lots of things by working on it, and even today it often gives me greater satisfaction to put pieces up here, without contraints of space and limits on quotation, than to see their shorter versions in the newspapers. Some of the literary blogs on The Middle Stage blogroll feature, day after day, week after week, exceptionally good commentary, links, and notes on unusual or neglected works (such as books from small publishers or the university presses).

In a way literary blogs are like a good opposition party in parliament, keeping the establishment on its toes, and often catering to niche interests. In fact, on the Indian scene - where a great range of books are published but the economics of newspaper publishing has marginalised books coverage, and most newspapers carry only a perfunctory one-page review section on Sundays - literary blogs probably have a more central role to play than elsewhere in the shaping of a robust literary culture, although I concede that this is the analysis of an interested party. But even in America and the UK, which have a healthier books culture, literary blogs have become an essential part of the scene. Blogs even link to the best of the newspaper reviews and essays, but instead of thinking in turn about what the best literary blogs have to offer, Kirsch seems fairly content to believe that the traffic deserves to be only one-way.

Just as there really isn't any competition in the world of literature - every essential poem, play or novel has its own specific luminosity - so too the newspaper review sections, literary journals, and litblogs can usefully complement each other. To argue that "the ethical and intellectual crotchets of the bloggers represent a dead end", as Kirsch does, is a mistake on not one but several levels. Wake up and smell the coffee, Mr.Kirsch.

On Jeffrey Goldberg's Prisoners

Since the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, observes the New Yorker staff writer Jeffrey Goldberg in his book Prisoners: A Muslim & A Jew Across The Middle East Divide, the Middle East has been "a landscape of wasting sadness and obliterating furies". For six decades now the Israeli state has been locked in intractable conflicts with Arab forces both without - from Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon - and within, in its ever-shifting tussle with the people of Palestine. Many rounds of talks and accords have come to nothing: the Middle East today is in more or less the same parlous condition as it has always been in contemporary public memory. Will the cycle of violence continue into the foreseeable future, or is there a way forward after so many years of accumulated resentments on both sides?

Goldberg's book, although it takes stock of many mistakes made, proposes no solutions, in part because there is no solution now that has not already been thought of before - what is missing, rather, is the will to proceed. Instead, his book is more a kind of political autobiography with some exceedingly interesting twists and turns - he is not a detached observer but an engaged party looking for some way that is acceptable to all. Sober and yet anguished, Prisoners carries on the great tradition of American nonfiction with its roots in magazine journalism, from Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, and Joseph Mitchell all the way down to the current editor of the New Yorker, David Remnick.

Goldberg writes that he was born an American Jew, in a family that was not very religious or tribe-conscious. But in his adolescence he began to seriously read Zionist literature and felt the pull of the state of Israel, the first real home of Jews around the world after thousands of years of harassment culminating in the abomination of the Holocaust. He bought into the perception that Jews were too soft and bookish, and unless they took up arms in their self-defence they would continue to be oppressed. With the zeal of a new convert, he journeyed to Israel in the late eighties and lived and worked for a while in a kibbutz. The state would not let him join the army because he was not an Israeli citizen, but he was drafted into the military police.

Goldberg was posted to Ketziot, the largest prison in Israel, home at the time to over six thousand Palestinians taken prisoner after the First Intifada of 1987. The presence of top leaders from Hamas, Fatah and the Palestinian Liberation Authority made the jail "a virtual Palestinian parliament". As a prison counselor Goldberg, who had never met any Palestinians before, had to serve as a bridge between the prisoners and the jail management. His account powerfully records, even from the point of view of someone who was not captive, what it is like to live in captivity.

At Ketziot, Goldberg established a tentative friendship with a young Palestinian prisoner, Rafiq Hijazi, and began to have discussions with him across the jail fence. Unlike the vast majority of the prisoners, with their aggravated sense of humiliation and implacable hatred, Hijazi is cool and analytical, open to another point of view. Goldberg wishes to make a friend of this person whose historical identity would make him his implacable opponent:

Rafiq and I would spend hours talking through the wire. We would ventilate our political stances. We would nitpick history. We didn't agree on much; he thought that Zionism was a form of kleptomania. But he did not mind hearing me rehearse for him the Jewish narrative. We would gossip about guards and prisoners, and we would, tentatively, with great gentility, talk about religion. We were both dedicated readers of our holy texts, though sometimes it seemed to me that he believed that the Quran was written by the hand of God, and I could not say I believed the same thing about my Bible. Despite this difference, we shared a set of essential values, because his distaste for violence seemed as real as mine.[...] "I don't like to see anyone get hurt," he told me once, and he said this without qualification.

Hijazi's abhorrence of violence is important, because Goldberg finds himself thinking that although the Palestinian liberation movement is full of the rhetoric and the practice of militant violence, there was no talk anywhere of nonviolent resistance - militant nonviolence. "The idea did not seem to exist in their moral vocabulary. It was a shame and a waste that the Palestinians had blinded themselves to the ideas of Gandhi and King. If they hadn't, they might have broken the occupation in a week. The Israelis, like the British soldiers of India, could not sustain such one-sided violence...especially in front of the television cameras."

Indeed, Gandhi's methods of recasting implacable conflicts so as to transform the dynamics of the relationship with an adversary are needed desperately now in the Middle East. As the scholar of religion Diana Eck illuminatingly writes:

Gandhi...never cast a fight in terms of the humiliation and defeat of the opponent. He saw clearly that if conflict is cast in terms of winning or losing, of us prevailing over them, then there will be no way forward [...]. Even if one wins absolutely, one still has a defeated enemy. The next round of the conflict is only postponed. In Gandhi's evolving philosophy of nonviolence, this is a crucial point. Gandhi refused to concede that the adversary...would forever remain polarized as the "other". If the polarization is not broken, then what we call "winning" is still losing, for we are left with an opponent, an enemy. [...] Gandhi refused to demonise his opponent as a person, even when he was in profound disagreement with everything he stood for.

In other words, Gandhi attempted to minimize the clash of egos, the sense of one's self-respect on the line, that is a part of any dispute, and focus instead on the principles at stake. These may be widely applicable thoughts, useful not only in a fight for political independence against a stronger party but even in an argument with your next-door neighbour.
Many years later, working now as a reporter, Goldberg returns to Palestine and seeks out Hijazi, now a free man and a professor of statistics at a university. His motto seems to be that of EM Forster, who in the epigraph to his famous novel Howards End (1910), urged "Only connect". Only through people-to-people connections, goes the optimistic hypothesis, can national or tribal hostilities be gradually broken down. Goldberg's talks with Hijazi over the years embody in microcosm the different stages and moods of the Middle East peace process.

"I realised I had all the hallmarks," writes Goldberg of his repeated visits to Palestine, "of a counterphobe, a person who seeks out close encounters with the thing he fears most." Counterphobe or not, his book illuminates in startling detail the texture of daily life in the occupied territories and the mentality of the different parties involved in the dispute. Goldberg's diagnosis is not optimistic. The radical group Hamas is now in power in Palestine, and in Goldberg's assessment it was Hamas which, "more than any other force, transformed the dispute between Arabs and Israelis into one between Muslims and Jews" in the eighties. But in humanising the conflict and making a genuine attempt to understand the thinking and aspirations of the adversary, Prisoners lays a tentative groundwork for a day when it may be possible to "only connect".

And some links: an interview with the Israeli novelist and political "dove" Amos Oz, in which he says intriguingly that he hopes the conflict will end in a Chekhovian and not a Shakespearean tragedy; "Bridging The Divide", an interview with the Palestinian intellectual Sari Nusseibeh, whose memoir Once Upon a Country was published recently; Looking At Ourselves", a speech given earlier this year by the novelist David Grossman, who lost his son in the clash against Lebanon last year; "Unwrapping The Gift", by the Palestinian emigre writer Samir El-Youssef; "Palestinians Need a Gandhi, Not a New Arafat", an old piece by Eric Weiner upon the death of Yasser Arafat in 2004; and "Gandhi vs. Terrorism" by Mark Juergensmeyer ("After a solution was imagined, the second stage of a struggle was to achieve it. This meant fighting - but in a way that was consistent with the solution itself. Gandhi adamantly rejected the notion that the goal justifies the means. Gandhi argued that the ends and the means were ultimately the same").

Jeffrey Goldberg discusses his book in a long dialogue with Shmuel Rosner here. And David Remnick, one of the best reporters of our times, has a piece here on the implications of Hamas's victory the Palestinian elections of 2006.

[A shorter version of this piece appears today in Mint.]

On Khaled Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns

A slightly different version of this piece appears today in the Observer.

The fictions of Khaled Hosseini portray not just a world out of joint—an Afghanistan racked first by conflict with the Soviets and then a civil war—but also, within it, families where unnatural formations are prevalent and guilty secrets harboured. This surfeit of disorder results in extravagant narratives that are always ticking away like timebombs. Disaster is never more than an arm's length away in Hosseini's work, as guns and bombs on the streets, and an insensitive and authoritarian patriarchal culture inside the home, create an atmosphere "of abasement, of degradation and despair".

While Hosseini's second novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns, rehashes some of the conflict-generation formulas of his debut novel, the bestselling The Kite Runner, the good news is that the writing is more assured, as is some of the characterization, and this is surely a praiseworthy thing. The Kite Runner was a schmaltzy, even insincere, story of two boyhood companions, master and servant, who are actually half-brothers. The book had plot turns you could see coming a mile away, and dull, flat writing that never rose much higher than the base ground of cliché. Indeed, at one point the grown-up narrator, now a successful novelist, even mounts an intriguing defence of clichés—"Because, often, they're dead-on".

The formation of a pair of boys overseen by a powerful father-figure of The Kite Runner is replaced, in A Thousand Splendid Suns, by a pair of striking women in thrall to a sinister husband. Mariam is an illegitimate child, a harami, who is married off when still a teenager to an elderly shoemaker, Rasheed. Mariam is unable bear Rasheed the son he so desperately wants, and is continuously mocked and beaten by him. She recalls her embittered mother's words: "Like a compass needle that points north, a man's accusing finger always finds a woman".

When the fighting in Kabul between the forces of rival warlords sparks off an exodus of civilians, Rasheed gives refuge to the attractive teenager Laila, and presses her to marry him. Laila agrees, but only because she bears in her womb the child of her lover, Tariq, destined to become another harami unless she acquiesces. Mariam is relegated to second-best status not just by Rasheed but also by the narrative, which often depicts her from Laila's point of view.

Hosseini is at his best in some of his descriptions of landscape—the secluded pastoral retreat where Mariam grows in the company of her mother, a visit made by Laila and Tariq to the giant Bamiyan Buddhas later blown up by the Taliban - and his account of the developing relationship of the two wives, which begins with hostility and slowly blossoms into a concord. Some of Hosseini's characters, like the demonic Rasheed, still feel more like obstacle courses that must be overcome by his battling protagonists. He still italicizes far too many sentences, and his chapter endings are like an archive of narrative alarm bells. But this is a modestly good and fairly readable work by an improving writer.

In Pragati

My recent piece on Arun Maira's book Discordant Democrats for Mint also appears in the June issue of Pragati, the monthly magazine of the group The Indian National Interest.

Pragati can be downloaded for free here. Among the other goods things I spotted in it was "Six great revolutions changing the nature of India's economy and society", an excerpt from Niranjan Rajadhyaksha's new book The Rise of India: Its Transformation from Poverty to Prosperity.

Coming up in June

Coming up in June, essays

on new fiction:

Khaled Hosseini's follow-up to The Kite Runner, A Thousand Splendid Suns,
Manjushree Thapa's book of stories Tilled Earth,
Daniel Kehlmann's surprise bestseller Measuring The World,
and possibly Sandor Marai's The Rebels





and non-fiction:

Christopher de Bellaigue's The Struggle for Iran,
Jeffrey Goldberg's Prisoners: A Muslim & A Jew Across The Middle East Divide,
and Ryszard Kapuscinski's Travels With Herodotus
.

On Arun Maira's Discordant Democrats

The title of Arun Maira's book Discordant Democrats might strike some readers as a tautology. After all, as the philosopher Sidney Hook has argued, in a true democracy the idea that in some crucial respects all men are equal must be complemented "by a belief in the value of difference, variety and uniqueness". If this is so - and India in particular is a fairground of difference, variety and uniqueness - then how can democracy not be discordant? The word "discordant" in this context is not necessarily the negative value that it would be with an orchestra, a cricket team, or a firm.

Yet the concern advanced by Maira, formerly an industrial executive and currently chairman of The Boston Consulting Group, India, is that Indian democracy is so fractious and unruly that it detracts from development. The parallel that pops up in his book, as it often does in discussions about Asia, is that of undemocratic China, which has put together world-class infrastructure within the span of a generation. By contrast, people entering the city from Mumbai's airport face eyesores, traffic snarls, and other signs of retarded development. Yet, as India has chosen the democratic way of life, there is no alternative to democracy; the only hope is to better it.

"[T]he improvement of democratic decision-making must be the agenda," argues Maira, "for Indians who want to accelerate the country's progress." It is with this specific problem in mind that he suggests five graduated steps for better debate and building consensus. These steps, he suggests, are like the gears of a car: some are to help us take off, but we cannot accelerate unless we move further down the chain of successful problem-solving. Readers will want to decide for themselves whether they find Maira's ideas about such concepts as aspiring, realizing and framing helpful.

Maira is a widely read man - among the many writers he cites in his book are Fareed Zakaria, Lewis Lapham, Jonathan Schell, Tariq Ali, and Thomas Friedman. Sometimes his survey or what other people have written can be insightful, such as when he cites the Dutch political scientist Arend Lijphart's classification of democracies into majoritarian ones, in which a stable two-party system is the norm, and consensus ones, in which power is divided between many competing players as in India. Intuition suggests that consensus democracies are slower and more inefficient, but in truth such democracies also manifest many good qualities, because forging a consensus means to some extent listening or deferring to the other side. When thinking about the pros and cons of fractured mandates of the kind widely seen in our era of coalition politics, it is useful to have information like this at hand.

Yet all too often Maira's book feels unhelpful, because it is too general. Maira's background is that of the corporate world, and the tone of his book is that of a self-help manual for managers. Many of the examples of successful conflict resolution Maira cites come from seminars and leadership conclaves he has attended. "Listening, like the atom, seems a very small thing. Yet it has enormous power to change the world," he counsels. On another occasion he writes, "In this scenario, many people rise like fireflies - living lights - all over the country and begin to transform darkness into light, despair into hope and passivity into action." Perhaps I do Maira a disfavour here by quoting him out of context, but his approach strikes me as a little too roseate. Like many management gurus, Maira also has a weakness for generating catchy acronyms, such as the concept of PLU ("People Like Us", or the tendency of people to assume conformity with their own values) and that of WMD ("Ways of Mass Dialogue").

But the fallacy manifest in Maira's book is also a PLM (People Like Me) kind, which assumes that all the actors in Indian democracy are committed to liberal values and to democratic debate and consensus - that they have the will but perhaps not the skill, which they can learn by adopting his "five steps to consensus". By doing so, he greatly simplifies matters. But, six decades after our experiment with democracy began, BR Ambedkar's assertion that "Democracy in India is only a top-dressing on an Indian soil which is essentially undemocratic" still remains acutely true today.

The real problem with India may be not so much that it is a nation of discordant democrats, but rather that it is under pressure on all sides from forces who do not subscribe to or have lost faith in the resolution of disputes by democratic and non-violent means. In other words, the weakness of Indian democracy is less that it is impracticably discordant and more that it is insufficiently deep-rooted - democracy is not yet for us a way of life. The failure to frame the problem properly makes Maira's treatise a well-intentioned but somewhat inadequate one.

And some essays: "Downloading Democracy" by the historian Robert Conquest ("Democracy is almost invariably criticized by revolutionaries for the blemishes found in any real example, as compared with the grand abstraction of the mere word. Real politics is full of what it would be charitable to call imperfections"); "The Guru of Hate", an essay by Ramachandra Guha on the still-influential Hindu ideologue MS Golwalkar, who thought democracy was alien to Hindu ethos and extolled the laws of Manu; "Democracy and Its Global Roots" by Amartya Sen; "Fears for Democracy in India" by Martha Nussbaum, whose book on India The Clash Within is just out from Harvard University Press; and "Nehru's Faith" by Sunil Khilnani.

And some old Middle Stage posts on writers dealing with aspects of Indian society and politics: Ashis Nandy, Krishna Kripalani, Pankaj Mishra, Minoo Masani and Amartya Sen.
A shorter version of this piece appears today in Mint.

On Gideon Haigh's All Out

When, at the WACA last December, Ricky Ponting's Australians overwhelmed Andrew Flintoff's Englishmen for the third time in three games, the most eagerly anticipated Ashes series in two decades had proved instead to be amongst the most one-sided ever. There seemed to be only two reasons for allowing a so obviously dead rubber to continue. One, Shane Warne and Glenn McGrath announced they were hanging up their boots, which automatically gave the last two Tests a sepia-tinted, valedictory air. And two, Gideon Haigh had been working up a nice rhythm in his reports and dispatches from the games, and to interrupt him at the top of his game, as Mike Atherton once did Graeme Hick in an Ashes Test, would have been too cruel.

Of all modern cricket writers, Haigh is the most versatile and companionable. In our post-post-Cardusian times, when television brings every detail of the great game into our living-rooms and in the breaks gray-haired pundits tell noodle-strapped lovelies everything there is to know, it is still possible to watch a day's cricket and then profitably read Haigh on it the next morning. He has a great sense of the ebb and flow of the game, an eye for the quirks of character of those who play it, a lovely prose style that throws off sparks of both erudition and sunny good humour, and a cat, Trumper, who was unfortunately left behind when he went to cover the cricket. Most daily journalism has a short shelf life, but the reports and columns collected in All Out merely bring together between two covers and some sturdy binding pieces we were all collecting anyway.

Insofar as the 2006-07 battle for the "sacred soot" was a contest - and England did have their moments - Haigh shows how it was one, and how the visitors gradually lost their way. The decisive moment of the series was at Adelaide, when England, after having controlled the game for four days, faltered inexplicably on the final morning and conceded a victory that surprised even their all-conquering opponents. That left England two games down, and from there they went steadily downhill. Could it have gone differently? Haigh argues that the itinerary did England no favours: not only did they have little match practice by way of warm-ups, but also the first two Tests were back-to back, allowing them little time to regroup after defeat at Brisbane.

A highlight of the series, as of the 2005 Ashes, was the bowling of Shane Warne. In turn, Haigh's writing is never better than when on the subject of Warne. One of the reasons why All Out will prove to be an enduring book is that it enshrines the moods and moves of the greatest slow bowler cricket has seen, on his last few days on the big stage.

Haigh recalls the time he first saw Warne's art broken down on a super-slow-motion camera, "his fingers undulating like piano keys as they set the ball rotating". He evokes Warne's garrulous, abrasive presence: walking back to his mark between deliveries, Warne is always "searching for eye contact, eager for a chirp"; sledged by close-in fielders while batting, he chunters,"You're making me concentrate!" The only opponent who gets under his skin is his Hampshire teammate Kevin Pietersen; their simmering face-offs are contests that Warne "affects to enjoy, but which he could enjoy more".

During the series Warne bowled some marathon spells. Haigh writes:

Arthur Shrewsbury, legend has it, went out to open for Nottinghamshire in country cricket having ordered his seltzer for teatime, in full expectation that he would still be batting. When Warne takes the ball these days, it is with a similarly proprietorial air. He arrives, settles, surveys. He attacks, consolidates, harries, heckles and sometimes even dawdles. Some bowlers hasten through their overs, as though to sneak a dot ball or two from a batsman not quite fully tensed. Warne never hurries, averaging about 210-240 seconds per over, the leisurely walk back being part of that tightly-grooved action, the thinking time both for himself and the batsman. What did Warnie just bowl me? What will Warnie bowl me next?

One drawling surveillance of a batsman's inadequacies can be guaranteed in most overs; a field change, conveyed by minimal gesture and perfunctory nod to his captain, every other over. Regular importuning of the umpires, of course, is guaranteed.

Note the third and fourth sentences of that passage, which seem to suggest that as a man of action, Warne can only be described by a battery of verbs.

Just to see Warne hand his cap over to the umpire was to know that game was going to rise in pitch - just as there can never be another Bradman, says Haigh, there can never be another Warne. On these pages, more than anywhere else, Shane Warne will always remain not out.

Here are two bits from Haigh's book as they first appeared in the newspapers, one on a long spell bowled by Warne at Perth, and the other a survey of the careers of Warne and Glenn McGrath - "the best slow bowler of all, and the best seam bowler of his era". And some other exceptional Haigh pieces: "The Game Was Never The Same", on the Packer revolution; "Man and Superman", on Garry Sobers; "Standing the Test of Time", on the factors that make for a great Test match; and lastly, a piece on the super-dull 2007 World Cup.

And an old post, on the best Indian cricket writing.

A shorter version of this piece appears this month in Cricinfo magazine.

On Barack Obama's The Audacity of Hope

At the National Convention of the Democratic Party in July 2004, a "skinny kid with a funny name" made one of the most stirring speeches in American political history. Barack Obama, then a little-known senator from Illinois, took to the stage and, beginning with his life story and moving outwards to the state of the nation, delivered - with the presidential elections only four months away - an address remarkably free of partisanship, cheap point-scoring, and hokey rhetoric.

Invoking the motto E pluribus unum ("Out of the many, one"), and declaring that there was not a conservative America and a liberal America but only "the United States of America", Obama immediately stood out before a nation weary of cynical and divisive politics. Almost overnight the mixed-race child of a Kenyan father and American mother was anointed the country's most promising young politician, and began to be talked of as a future candidate for president. The process set in motion that day in 2004 reached its logical conclusion in February this year, when Obama announced he would compete with Hillary Clinton and John Edwards to be the Democratic nominee for next year's presidential elections. If elected, Obama will become America's first black President.

The Audacity of Hope, Obama's new book, draws upon one of the many memorable phrases from Obama's speech in 2004 to articulate his vision of American society, politics, and foreign policy. It is a book that Obama, still a relative unknown, had to write for many reasons. It serves as an autobiography to those unfamiliar with him, and as a campaign manifesto for those wanting to test out his ideas. Also, as Obama has himself said, a book allows for more complex and judicious arguments than a quote or a sound-bite. In the difficult arena of electoral politics, where opponents are waiting to seize upon your lapses or twist your words out of context, it is an advantage to have a written record of your stances.

What does The Audacity of Hope reveal about Obama's personality? The most distinctive feature of his book is the extent to which he speaks the language of inclusion, of conversation rather than confrontation. Success in politics often requires the carving out of a distinctive space for one's own ideas, or the canny repositioning of the ideas of one's adversaries. But Obama is seen on several occasions searching for "the common ground" between himself and his opponents, and insisting their similarities are more significant than their differences. He is clearly by nature a moderate and a centrist, which helps explain his attraction for American voters after the fractious and polarizing years of the Bush regime. American presidential candidates have often defined themselves in opposition to their predecessor, but Obama's air of quiet resolve contrasts naturally with Bush's bellicosity.

If anything, Obama is too courteous. Early in his book there is a revelatory moment in which he visits the White House, and spends a few minutes in the company of Bush. Although Obama has been an outspoken critic of Bush's policies - in particular of the war on Iraq and Bush's tax cuts for the rich - he insists "that I don't consider George Bush a bad man, and that I assume he and members of his Administration are trying to do what they think is best for the country". This is a characteristic Obama gambit - he argues convincingly on several other instances for the need to abandon our tendency to impute bad faith to those with whom we disagree. But at some point incompetence and partisanship do become issues of character and personality.

Partly Obama's tone - and indeed the quality of his writing - is a reflection of his background as a civil-rights lawyer and community organiser. Partly it has to do with his family background, which is more diverse (and therefore representative of America, a nation of immigrants) than that of any presidential candidate in recent memory. But his insistence of playing by the rules, according respect to opponents, and avoiding divisive rhetoric and low blows is also his most important asset in a field populated by vastly more experienced candidates, including Clinton and John McCain.

An example of how Obama brings together points of view from opposing sides of the spectrum can be found in this passage on the place of religion in politics, a contentious issue in multi-faith America. Although Obama thinks the separation of Church and State one of the best things about the American consitution, he argues that this does not mean that politics should be a totally secular space bleached of all religious frames of reference. He argues,

Surely, secularists are wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering the public square; Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, William Jennings Bryan, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King, Jr. - indeed the majority of great reformers in American history - not only were motivated by faith but repeatedly used religious language to argue their causes. To say that men and women should not inject their "personal morality" into public-policy debates is a practical absurdity; our law is by definition a codification of morality, much of it grounded in the Judeo-Christian tradition.

What our deliberative, pluralistic democracy does demand is that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. It requires that their proposals must be subject to argument and amenable to reason. If I am opposed to banning abortion for religious reasons and seek to pass a law banning the practice, I cannot simply point to the teachings of my church or invoke God's will and expect that argument to carry the day. If I want others to listen to me, then I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all.

And in another passage he writes about the ideal of freedom enshrined in American life by the Declaration of Independence of 1776, with the famous line:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

These simple words are our starting point as Americans; they describe not only the foundation of our government but the substance of our common creed. Not every American may be able to recite them; few, if asked, could trace the genesis of the Declaration of Independence to its roots in eighteenth-century liberal and republican thought. But the essential idea behind the Declaration - that we are born into this world free, all of us; that each of us arrives with a bundle of rights that can't be taken away by any person or any state without just cause; that through our own agency we can, and must, make of our lives what we will - is one that every American understands....

Indeed, the value of freedom is so deeply ingrained in us that we tend to take it for granted. It is easy to forget that at the time of our nation's founding this idea was entirely radical in its implications, as radical as Martin Luther's posting on the church door. It is an idea that some portion of the world still rejects - and for which an even larger portion of humanity finds scant evidence in their daily lives.

In fact, much of my appreciation of our Bill of Rights comes from having spent part of my childhood in Indonesia and from still having family in Kenya, countries where individual rights are almost entirely subject to the self-restraint of army generals or the whims of corrupt bureaucrats.

Obama is good at making us think about things that we often take for granted. If successful candidates are expected to have some kind of big idea that sets them apart from the rest, then in some ways Obama's big idea is that he has no big idea. Although he offers nuanced and complex arguments on issues like globalisation and the economy, school and university education, health insurance and race relations (and a thrilling meditation on the Constitution), his attitude is more distinctive than his policy.

"As a country, we seem to be suffering from an empathy deficit," he argues. "[Empathy]…calls us all to task…We are all shaken out of our complacency. We are all forced beyond our limited vision." Not to practise empathy for others, he cajoles gently, is "to relinquish our best selves". It remains to be seen how far this audacious message will take Obama, but he can certainly be read for profit and inspiration in our country, with its own deficit of good men in politics.

Both the text and a video of Obama's splendid keynote address at the 2004 Democratic Convention can be found here.

A chapter from The Audacity of Hope, called "My Spiritual Journey", can be found here, and an exellent recent profile of Obama by Larissa MacFarquhar in the New Yorker is here. The Guardian even published a piece recently called "The Lyrical Democrat", publishing some poems Obama wrote when he was in his teens (link thanks to Space Bar). Slate magazine has an excellent archive of Obama cartoons published in the American press here, of which my favourites are these ones by Steve Sack, Signe Wilkinson, and the one by Tom Toles reproduced below from The Washington Post.

Update, August 25 - Robert McCrum writes about Obama's previous book Dreams of My Father and thinks it to be "a literary tradition of political prose that goes back to another master of the American language: Abraham Lincoln".

Update, February 24, 2008 - Morgan Meis on the Audacity of Hope and how "Obama thinks of himself as Lincoln".

Update, July 2, 2008 - Obama's thrilling speech on race delivered in Philadelphia in March is here, and Garry Wills's equally brilliant meditation on two speeches on race by Lincoln and Obama is here. And lastly, "A literary critic reads Obama" by Andrew Delbanco ("This is the writing of someone trying to map a route through a world where choices are less often between good and bad than between competing goods. Though [The Audacity of Hope] lacks the sensual immediacy of the earlier book, the language is open and unresolved, the sentences organized around pairs of sentiments or arguments that exert equal force against each other--a reflection of ongoing thinking rather than a statement of settled thoughts").

Update, July 18, 2008: Dayo Olopade surveys the field of Obama cartoons in "Sketchy Imagery" ("During Obama's meteoric rise from state senate to the threshold of the oval office, political cartoonists have had to grapple not just with a fresh face to draw, but a new race to signify.")

Ambrose Bierce, always of the devil's party

After two days of being immersed in the misty platitudes and dubious certainties of Paulo Coelho ("Everything in life is an omen"; "Love simply is"; "When you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you achieve it" - yes, these are the deeps in which a weekly book reviewer can sometimes flounder) I found myself heartily sick of the words hope, love, destiny, and soul, and desperately needed something wicked and cynical just to restore my faith in humanity. Poking amongst my books, I found something that can be prescribed universally as a tonic against the literature of self-help and soul-ascent: Ambrose Bierce's dazzling The Devil's Dictionary.

Bierce (1842-1914) spent most of his working life as a journalist, a breed permanently inclined to thinking the worst of humanity. Other factors that might have influenced his sardonic view of human nature was the fact that he was the tenth of thirteen children, all with names beginning with the letter "A", and the American Civil War, which he was to write about in many short stories and in the memoir What I Saw of Shiloh.

But it is for The Devil's Dictionary (1911) that Bierce is remembered today. It began in the eighteen-eighties as a weekly newspaper column, each piece containing fifteen or twenty humorous definitions of words. Some definitions were only a sentence long, while others stretched to two or three paragraphs. Bierce's strong, vigorous prose style - one attribute in a writer's work that can never dates or go out of fashion - and savagely misanthropic wit made for a winning combination. When his work was published in book form in 1911, he addressed it to "enlightened souls who prefer dry wine to sweet, sense to sentiment, wit to humour and clean English to slang".

The pleasure of reading The Devil's Dictionary is the way Bierce recasts the meanings of words not as they exist in a conventional dictionary, but as they are realised in human affairs. "Acquaintance, n. A person whom we know well enough to borrow from, but not to lend to. A degree of friendship called slight when its object is poor or obscure, and intimate when he is rich or famous." Distance is understood as "The only thing that the rich are willing for the poor to call theirs, and keep." And no one has ever bettered his definition of Present as "That part of eternity dividing the domain of disappointment from the realm of hope".

Often Bierce's definitions wittily suggest that things are merely a function of perspective. Accuse is a verb which means "To affirm another's guilt or unworth; most commonly as a justification of ourselves for having wronged him", and a Bore is "A person who talks when you wish him to listen". That last definition nicely suggests that where there is one bore, there are actually two.

Sometimes Bierce used his definitions as springboards for further inquiry, such as the charge of ahistorical writing in literature in this entry on "handkerchief":

Handkerchief, n. A small square of silk or linen, used in various ignoble offices about the face and especially serviceable at funerals to conceal the lack of tears. The handkerchief is of recent invention; our ancestors knew nothing of it and intrusted its duties to the sleeve. Shakespeare's introducing it into the play of "Othello" is an anachronism: Desdemona dried her nose with her skirt…

And elsewhere he plays upon the idea that all emotions are a result of chemical reactions in the body in his entry on "Heart":

Heart, n. An automatic, muscular blood-pump. Figuratively, this useful organ is said to be the seat of emotions and sentiments - a very pretty fancy which, however, is nothing but the survival of a once universal belief. It is now known that the sentiments and emotions reside in the stomach, being evolved from food by the chemical action of the gastric fluid. The exact process by which a beefsteak becomes a feeling - tender or not, according to the age of the animal from which it was cut…; the marvelous functional methods of converting a hard-boiled egg into religious contrition, or a cream-puff into a sigh of sensibility - these things have been patiently ascertained by M.Pasteur, and by him expounded with convincing lucidity. […]for further light consult Professor Dam's famous treatise on Love as a Product of Alimentary Maceration.

A very pretty fancy - Bierce was the scourge of those who entertained very pretty fancies. Even when you grow used to the character of his wit, he is still capable of surprising you, as in his definition of Painting as "The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather and exposing them to the critic", which manages, like the entry on Bore, to take down two targets with one shot.

Explaining the allure of the figure of Satan in Milton's epic poem Paradise Lost, William Blake remarked that "The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet, and of the Devil's party without knowing it." Bierce was of the Devil's party too, but he knew it, and was proud of it.

The Devil's Dictionary can be read in full here.

And old posts on two great Indian satirical writers: Fakir Mohan Senapati and Parashuram.