Rural France, Central Asia, Bill Bryson's Small-Town America and New Economics

Hi!

Heart yearns excessively and inconsolably for an indulgence which inclement time forbids in near future. I have been constantly thinking of travel these days. Travel books, I suppose, will offer enhanced pleasure in these dreary times. I talk about a few today.

 Peter Mayle’s A Year in Provence, achieved massive success when it was published in late eighties. Popularity of the book was so enormous that it was seen as a major reason for booming real estate price in Provence in the following decades. Actually it is not a travel book, but a memoir of Mayle couple’s first year in Provence, the endearing French countryside, where they moved after living in Britain all their lives. It’s written extremely well and is magnificently humorous. I’m sure it will spawn many plans for a future holiday in the rural France. 

I have always harboured an indescribable fascination for the ancient Silk Route: those mysterious remote lands, the bleak landscape, the exotic natives, their strange customs, and the element of intrigue and adventure. With little effort I could vividly picture in my mind’s eyes the shenanigans of world superpowers, mainly Britain and Russia, engaged in the Great Game being played in this region and the intrepid spy-adventurers described stunningly in Peter Hopkirk’s books and Rudyard Kipling’s Kim. 

The only Central Asian country I have seen is Afghanistan. I landed on the forlorn air-strip of the city of Mazar-e-Sharif on a cold, windy, cloud-laden day, one December morning, nearly two decades back.  Over the next year, in the war-beaten country, I occasionally glimpsed images of the silk-route as were engraved in my mind (Or was it an illusion arising from a long preconditioning!): the crowded bazars, thronging with tall swarthy men in loose trousers, their torsos and heads wrapped in huge blankets, faces hemmed by profuse beards; silhouette of a gun clearly perceptible in the folds of blanket on the backs and shoulders of many; the busy lively streets with vendors selling hot naans, or roasting kababs on charcoal embers; hand-pulled carts loaded with dry-fruits; fruit vendors on raised wooden platforms overflowing with massive mounds of huge melons; women folk, all looking alike in their flowing blue burqas, followed by a brood of cute children with round faces and ruddy complexions; restaurants where one sat cross-legged on mattresses flung on the floor; houses of native friends where one never met a female member and was served delicious food by the children of the house; the small oasis-villages in the rambling desert surrounding Mazar city, situated besides a gurgling stream, amidst lush orchards of peach and pears, excursions to the countryside in spring, the low rolling hills, rising and falling endlessly all around, desolate and beautiful, wisp of smoke and the delicious aroma of kababs wafting from the venue of picnic at six in the morning. It felt mesmerizingly strange and ages removed, from the world I had come from. 

 I am perpetually on a lookout for travel books on this region. I read Mishi Saran’s Chasing the Monk’s Shadow, many years back. In the book, Mishi Saran describes her travel on the route traversed by the Chinese monk, Xuan Zang, in 7^th century A.D., as he travelled to India from China. Mishi Saran spiritedly describes her sojourn through these wild lands. She talks about the landscape and its people at length, providing an ideal menu for a languid reverie of an armchair traveller.

 Bill Bryson is the funniest author alive. He has perfected an incomparable style of humorous prose which is irreverential, often self-deprecating, uproariously funny and yet has a delectable prose style. His oeuvre of books is huge and diverse. His travel books provide much information, unobtrusively hidden in his hilarious prose. Lost Continent describes his fifteen-hundred-mile journey through small towns of America. It vicariously sates many desires of a traveller, but excites several more.

 In a previous post I wrote about my fondness for John le Carre’s The Spy Who Came in From Cold. In 2017, he published A Legacy of Spies, when he was eighty-six. I cannot even begin to think how someone can retain such incisive mental faculties in their ninth decade. Book is a sequel to The Spy Who Came in From Cold, and as you read it you realise it is a prequel too. It has the charm of a classic espionage book of sixties and seventies. Fans of John le Carre would not wait for any recommendation to pick it up.

 Our mind is a product of evolution like any other organ in the body, for eg., eyes, hands, kidneys, etc. It evolved over hundreds of millennia for serving the specific needs of early humans. Economics, as is practiced in modern world, was not one of these. But mind uses its older pathways to arrive at decisions in economics too and errs substantially. Richard Thaler, Professor of Economics and Behavioural Sciences, at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business calls this ‘misbehaviour’ of human mind. He is the pioneer of the new branch of economics, the Behavioural Economics, which recognises that human economic decisions are influenced by our behaviour patterns. Richard Thaler received 2017 Noble prize in economics. In his book, Misbehaving, he describes his experiences as he went about studying and developing this fascinating science of decision-making. Book is written in a conversational tone. Thaler has religiously eschewed technical details and thus makes the book highly accessible to a layperson.