Lets Burn Them Damn Books

(A post in Bibliobibuli inspires this post)

I followed the links, strayed to some new ones, googled some. Amazing, the number of books we have burned through history, the number of libraries we have razed to the ground. No culture, no people have been immune to this. Every single culture, civilized or not, at one time or another, has been a perpetrator.

Something at last, apart from not talking about sex, in common among the sons and daughter’s of Adam. While we are so divided by sense of self, be it the Western sense of superiority of their democratic way of life or the Asian sense of the superiority of their Values, we are a more divided than many optimists would like to believe.

Read “Book-burning” at Wikipedia. One incident, however small, was not there.

When British captured the fort of Tipu Sultan, one of the first casualties was the library. Gidwani, in his book “The Sword of Tipu Sultan” creates a fictitious character of a traveling father and son watching the bonfire:

“What are they burning father?”

“They are burning humanity son.” Or was it civilization that he said, can't remember, read the book a quarter of a century ago.

Dalrymple has very apt article on Tipu Sultan and Imperial villain making that is relevant even today.


An afterthought:

Have been guilty of the desire to burn books at times myself. Some that I thought should not be left on my bookshelf for posterity to judge me by my reading habits. I have, though, dumped some in the trash can.

If you were given a guilt free coupon to burn one book, which one would it be?

No, Seriously....

I don’t like serious people. I am one I think, I don’t like myself that much either.



I don’t suffer from Hypertension, except when my twelve year old comes and tells me she absolutely must have those trousers Avril Lavigne wore in that latest song. (I would probably have got a stroke if she had asked for the dress Shakira wore while singing ‘Hips Don’t Lie,” but cares for my health so much, the darling, and hasn’t so far broached the subject.)



Serious people are boring. I have enjoyed reading Kant, Nietzsche and Marx, but damned if I would invite them to dinner; a conversation maybe, not dinner. I would rather having Wilde and Bob Hope for dinner and put them across each other at the table.



Chauvinists are pigs and Feminists their counterparts, both worth ignoring. Both are looking at the same coin from opposing angles and claiming it to be theirs.



Gays make good company, I have no idea of how good a lesbian’s companionship would be, hardly had the opportunity to note.



Serious people, I think, miss a lot of fun. I know I do.



Someone asked me, why the anonymity, well… the glib answer is because it is possible. The truth is I wrote under a different nom de plume before and the climax left a bad taste in the mouth. Anonymity is good, but it is better if you think you are anonymous and others know who you are. Now that is fun. Some of you might actually have made that discovery or might make it eventually. Though it may sound oxymoron-ish, anonymity is a hard thing to hide too.



Last night, passing through, I reached Antares’ blog. Reading his contemplation of eternity, I said to my wife: “Look, honey, this is a similar discussion we had, only ours was on Time and Reality…”



“You mean the one that I did not understand a word of?”



“Precisely. What a memory you have!”



"Oh yes, I remember, that was when I was talking about that beautiful necklace I saw."



"I was explaining to you the correlation of Time and Reality. Give it a little time and in reality it won't seem as beautiful."



Soon she says she will have to perform an Antares-ectomy if I don’t come to bed. I take the notebook to bed, silly me.

Wife and Books

Your spouse wife should never read your book, or your blog either. It is fraught with danger, at every turn.

Marriage as it is has enough problems on its own. You don’t take the trash out, you do it too early before she is done with the kitchen. The fence she has been asking you to mend has been mendless (I know there is no such word, but hey…).

Your girlfriend reads your books is fine, magnificent even . But girlfriends change when the “I do” come in. Which in some desperate-hair-pulling moments you wonder if you heard it right and if she actually said “Adoi..” You were of course to excited to have captured that Kodak moment correctly in your memory and never can be sure.

Girlfriend is different, see: when you were still wearing the tight fitting jeans and were trying to woo her, you could jump over the jalopy, whip out your comb, flick it across your Brylcreamed hair while glancing in the side view mirror and open the door for her to step out, all that in a jiffy and in a seamless, poetic motion. Now she comes between you and the third repeat of that Manchester United vs Liverpool match on the television you tell her ass is great but not transparent.

It is not that you love her any less. You do, always did, but well, you are not twenty something anymore and things change.

Your wife should never read your books or your blog: For instance, you wrote a nice story about a woman and her cat.

“Who is that woman, how come I don’t know her?”

“Honey, sweetie, my sugar coated flu pill, that woman is a figment of my imagination.”

“Don’t lie to me, I know you men, you are all alike.”

Well, you wrote a clichéd poem comparing the landscape to a woman’s long hair. Your wife likes to keep them short and tidy, just the way you like them, but questions will come.

Let your wife read your books or blog at your peril.

"Can You Suggest Me A Book To Read?"

Being, perhaps, the one eyed in the town of blind, I get this asked of me a lot.

“Can you suggest me a book to read?”

I most certainly could, I would suggest that you first start with the classics. Maybe with Dickens, read Oliver Twist, Great Expectations, David Copperfield. Dickens, after all is not hard on the comprehension, might make a good start for anyone into reading. The trip, of course should ideally have started a long time ago. Being prepped up by Famous Fives, The Secret Sevens, The hardy Boys.

(To some I have been inclined to tersely suggest Wren & Martin. I have have been able to control that urge seeing that while that would one finger pointing at them, the rest would be showing my direction.)

Having started reading early is simply, having started well.

Because books, like events, are best read at a particular time, they have that much more significance; their impact is that much lasting.

Imagine for a moment, not having read Dickens in early teens? The character of Mr Pickwick is a whole lot different when you are fourteen of fifteen. Or not having read Tess of the D’Ubervilles, when puberty has just struck you? The romantic in you takes over, you wistfully look at the clouds and make up your mind you are going to marry a milkmaid when you grow up. Can you imagine not having read Two Men in a Boat in teens?

All of Dickens, Maupassant, Hardy, and Shakespeare must be read between the ages thirteen and twenty. Only then you can happily graduate to Thoreau, Sartre, Rand.

Only then you can, feast of everything else you can lay your hands on. Even the telephone book.

But alas, the person asking the question is not one who has, so to say, come up the ladder. He needs a book, which he probably will read it in a long protracted laborious way. He might understand what he has read or he might just sigh and feel happy that he read it.

I have flippantly answered that question many times. “Vatsyana” to a particularly prudish lady. “Gibbon”, “Hemingway”. I had the feeling that if they have not read so far they probably are going to read much.

There was a thought too, clawing at my mind. What if, there was one serious potential reader, a late blooming Tiger Woods of reading and I thwarted him by my flippancy or a wrong choice of book I gave him?

It sometimes is an agonizing thought; believe me. One I have never been able to decide. Should you start a newbie with bestsellers, racy fiction of Dan Brown, maybe go back a little to tried and tested ones by Harold Robbins, Arthur Hailey? Robbins’ A Stone for Danny Fisher bordered precariously on literary fiction.

Or would you rather take a risk and ask him to read Life of Pi, God of Small Things, Midnight’s Children, A Hundred Years of Solitude…

Must ask Tunku Halim, Eric Forbes, Sharon Bakar, Zafar Anjum this question.

The Caliphs of Baghdad

This article by William Darlymple:

The Caliphs of Baghdad

Books and Shelves

My library these days is not as impressive as I would have liked it to be. Sure, I have a variety that is heart warming, a good collection of books I have read a couple of times and more, some that I bought and could not finish through the first couple of chapters. Some just lie there, unread, unopened, waiting for the right time and right mood to strike me to open them.

Everyone has such a combination of books I expect. My book shelves are not impressive either. I had wanted, growing up, to make book shelves of that tamarind tree growing outside the house I grew up in. I would sit and look at it, staring at the gnarled old fella and imagine it laid down flat, one upon another in boards and two by twos. All sanded and varnished of course. I was sure it would be enough wood to fit my present collection and any future needs.

It was not to be. Someone else got to it first, while I was away. In the tree felling tradition that we have so strenuously guarded, out it went. It stood in the way, I was told, of the new cables the telephone company was laying, it was not worth the two or three meters of extra cable it would take to go around it.

So my hopes of a tamarind tree bookshelves were dashed.

Really, books need to be kept well as they are read. You can’t keep Shakespeare in an Ikea bought ready-to-assemble wooden contraption, can you. That would be equivalent to blasphemy. If you had an Ayatollah of Books, you could be sentenced to the fate of Salman Rushdie. Or imagine a couple of volumes of Gibbon on the kitchen table, usually used for the tiny ones to prop himself higher on the chair.

There are some dos and don’ts when it comes to books, all open to be being flaunted of course. That’s true with every religion, I suppose, they make rules and we flaunt them. That’s what makes us human. I don’t follow Prophet Dewey’s dictates when it comes to arranging books. Nope, his teachings are just too boring, too (for lack of a proper word) communistic. How can you classify books thus? Where is the fun, the joy?

I know of people who arrange books by color, I have no qualms with that, or that some like to arrange them by size. A tad boring, that system, pleasing to the eyes but it does not give as much sadistic pleasure as I get when I arrange my bookshelf.

I put the Life of Ayatollah Khomeini next to Nietzsche, a hell of a conversation they must be having, I imagine. Kamasutra, as always, must be in the lower shelf, well within the reach of the young ones. I change the positions too, from time to time. The other day I left Gandhi’s ‘My Experiments with Truth’ right next to a book about Yasser Arafat. ( I don’t have one on Osama, which would have been more appropriate.

Sometimes Moraes gets bored with Ezekiel and needs a change of air, he did not fancy Ezra Pound and anyway did not write much poetry so he keeps moving from ‘Complete Guide to Whiskey’ by Murray to Premchand’s ‘Godaan.’

Naipaul, of course, lies in one bookshelf, surrounded by Banana Leaf Men, some copies of James Hadley Chase Harold Robbins. That is the highest, farthest shelf and needs a tall stool to reach.

Waiting for Kam Raslan’s book and from I what I have read in ‘Off the Edge.’ I reckon I have to find a place for it somewhere close to ‘Life of Pi.’ That on a eyes-level shelf. The best place for a book to be.

God Day All