Our man in Havana Graham Greene   English spy story, that is true to life, probably began in early twentieth century with Somerset Maugham’s Ashenden tales. Maugham worked for secret service during the second world war. He was stationed in Lucerne, in the neutral Switzerland, and was also sent to Russia ‘ to prevent the Bolshevik Revolution and to keep Russia in the war’. He wrote a few short stories based on these experiences. These are collected in his book, Ashenden. Ashenden was Maugham’s chosen pen-name. In the preface to the collection, Maugham wrote that ‘this book is a work of fiction, though I should say not much more so than several of the books on the same subject that have appeared during the last few years and that purport to be truthful memoirs’. Later Graham Greene and John Le Carre wrote popular and acclaimed books in this genre. Commenting on his work as a spy, Maugham said in the preface that, ‘t he work of an agent in the Intelligence Department is on the wh

  Facts in Figures Fiction-Besotted Mind in a Factful World   These days figures are everywhere. They flaunt themselves in dailies. They hog news headlines on TV. They dance on the world wide web, popping up all the time from the corners of your screen. They smudge WhatsApp messages freely. Your ward-boy in the hospital throws them at you, defiant in his new-gained knowledge. ‘Sir, we are much better in UP. We had only ten cases in Kanpur, yesterday. Delhi had more than two thousand five hundred.’   You are submerged in a deluge of data: day-in, day-out. Data’s outreach is astounding; total cases, twenty-four hours' surge, seven-day growth rate, doubling rate, mortality rate, tests done daily, sensitivity and specificity of various tests, the infectivity rate, the positivity rate. There are curves that run amok; the ascending and the descending curves, the plateauing and the flattening curves. And the changing recommendations for quarantine, for testing, for admissions, f

Hi!   Writing is a lonely occupation. But the produce of your solitary labour is to be consumed by many. Maestros, who have bothered to write about their craft, have advised fledglings to be wary of an imaginary reader looking down their shoulder as they write. This ghost reader is a reminder that though you write to sate an inner desire, your ultimate aim is to be read. Your words will be read in your absence. Short of these words, there wouldn’t be anyone else to sing your thoughts. How much ever you may try to straighten your words, these are the children of your imagination. You understand them instinctively. It is difficult to anticipate if the future reader will be able to grasp them as readily. And opaqueness in writing is a mighty put-off, killing it instantaneously. This thought bugs me constantly as I tap the keys and see a sentence emerging on the screen of the monitor.     I like reading about the life of authors I admire. I usually desist picking up one, until I have

Adventure/Memoir   High Adventure-Our Ascent of Everest Sir Edmund Hillary               On 29 May 1953 Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay became the first men to set foot on the highest point on earth, the peak of Mount Everest at 29035 feet. This is Edmund Hillary's memoir of this remarkable feat.             He writes in a smooth flowing prose, maintaining a charming style and language. He is never dismissive of his achievements nor indulges in self-aggrandizement. 'I was sixteen before I ever saw a mountain.' This sentence starts the memoir and this forthrightness is seen throughout the book. He writes about the 1951 expedition for reconnaissance and exploration of the Southern approach to Everest and the 1952 practice climbing expedition to Cho Lou too.             In mid-twentieth century most of the Himalayan peaks lay unexplored. Nepal had recently opened its borders to foreigners for climbing and Hillary and his team-mates experienced limitless excitem

Autobiography   A Sort of Life Graham Greene                   Graham Greene calls his autobiography ‘A Sort of Life’ because unlike a biography ‘an autobiography is selective: it begins later and it ends prematurely’. He finishes his story with the years of failure which followed publication of his first book. He was then only twenty-seven, an early age to end the narrative of a life written at the age of sixty-five. But his reason is that ‘failure is also like death and thus provides for a very satisfactory ending’. And his motive for writing his autobiography, ‘a desire to reduce the chaos of experience to some sort of order, and a hungry curiosity’.                 He writes in his inimitable terse and unaffected style. Book is short, some one hundred and fifty pages. He recalls his childhood spent in Berkhamstead, his days at Oxford, his years at The Times as a subeditor, the thrill of the publication of his first novel The Man Within, which received a moderate success

Current Affairs/Memoir/History   Cables From Kabul-The Inside Story of the West's Afghanistan Campaign Sherard Cowper-Coles               Sherard Cowper Coles was British ambassador in Afghanistan from 2007-2009 and then British Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan for about a year. For over three years he had a bird’s-eye view of West's effort to bring Afghanistan back to normalcy —normalcy as perceived by West and for West, read predominantly USA— after more than three decades of incessant wars, both external and internal. This book is not an in-depth analysis of West's Afghanistan campaign, which began in 2001 and continues still. These are Sherard's memoirs of his stay and involvement in Afghanistan, albeit, with thoughtful analysis of the Afghanistan situation, the incessant follies which US politicians perpetrated and the helplessness of British government to influence the Campaign as its role was just to bolster the US efforts and play a

Science   The Red Queen-Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature Matt Ridley   It is said of second law of thermodynamics that if any new theory in physics falls foul of this law it is bound to be doomed. In biological sciences a similar stature can be granted to Darwin’s theory of Evolution by Natural Selection. In modern biology all facts of life have to be explained in the light of this theory. It is now accepted that human anatomy and physiology are products of this evolution. But human nature was thought to be in a different league. It was argued to be a product of human culture. It was believed that animal behaviour could not have any parallel in human nature. Former was a product of inherited instincts while later was learnt. This view prevailed among biologist throughout the first half of twentieth century. Edward Wilson’s ‘Sociobiology’ challenged this opinion and the last four to five decades have witnessed a meteoric growth in Evolutionary Psychology, wherein human na

Novel   The Deadly Affair John Le Carre   This was Le Carre’s first book, published in 1961 as  Call for the Dead.  It was later filmed as  The Deadly Affair.  In this book, Le Carre introduced George Smiley, his protagonist spy who later featured in his many popular books. George Smiley has recently separated from his wife, Anne Sercomb. He is now middle-aged, has finished with field work in espionage, and is assigned office job in London by his Foreign Intelligence (MI) bosses. Novel begins with a short history of Smiley and then rapidly plunges into the plot of the story. It is the post-second world war era of anti-communism paranoia of west, the peak of infamous cold-war years. Smiley interviews a high-ranking foreign-office bureaucrat for his alleged links with communists when the former was in college, decades back. Smiley has found nothing in the interview to substantiate the allegations, referred in an anonymous letter received at MI. Day after the interview, Fennan