Dithering woman speaks - On Intuitive Surgical (Ticker ISRG)

Now and then my husband asks me for a call on our investments. My thoughts on the Intuitive Surgical Story have run away with me.

Intuitive Surgical is a US based company that makes robotic surgical systems. There is a surgeon who sits on a computer console from where he directs the robot to perform laparoscopic surgery.  

Laparoscopic surgery means surgery where the surgeon has no direct visual access to the surgical field. He sees through the laparoscope. The laparoscope is a tube attached with video cameras, and it is inserted into the patient through a smaller incision. Using the image from the endoscope, the surgeon traditionally uses long handled instruments to perform the surgery. This is also called Minimal Invasive Surgery – MIS for short.

Suppose you dropped your ring in the trashcan. You could wade in and get your hands dirty or you could shine a torch and look carefully before picking it up with a pair of long handled forceps. The second option requires more skill. What you do is key when that trashcan happens to be a human body. Surgeons receive special training for laparoscopic surgery.

The Intuitive Surgical Robot is called ‘da Vinci’. It has 4 arms and it can be moved around the operating table. 2 arms have surgical tools like scissors scalpels etc. 1 arm has electrocautery instruments, 1 arm has the endoscope with two lenses.

Using the console the surgeon maneuvers with his two hands the two tool arms of the robot. With his left foot he manipulates the lever that controls the robot’s endoscopic 3^rd arm that gives stereoscopic visual access to the surgical field. With the right foot he controls the AC current flow to the 4^th electrosurgical arm for cutting/blood coagulation/ cauterizing purposes.

So you’re not struggling with those long forceps, you have your own friendly robot, wristed and all, capable of listening to your remote control commands to pick that ring up. An expensive but probably the better solution, right?

Makes sense, and the operational and financial success of Intuitive Surgical attests to it. It has helped that the company has pursued an aggressive and concerted marketing strategy, managing to make inroads in the medical sector, selling the robots in greater and greater numbers. How did they do this? By going directly to the customers to explain the advantages of robotic surgery so that patient demand drove hospital purchases. The sales team is linked into the use of the machines in the hospitals and is looking at all times to increase applications.

Intuitive Surgical has shown great results. It is trading at USD 500, with a Price to Earnings ratio (exactly what it means -  Price of the share divided by the Earnings per share; Earnings per share is again what it means Net profit of the Company divided by the Number of shares of the company) of 29; Net Income at USD 657 mio has exceeded expectations. And the market for revolutionary surgery techniques should only grow.

However some questions have been raised. Apparently evidence that robotic surgery delivers much benefit when compared to other MIS (minimally invasive surgery) is scarce. Since it is much more expensive this puts a question mark on insurance funding. Then there is the matter of lawsuits that allege that system malfunction has resulted in adverse surgical results, which would definitely be a negative. An FDA investigation has seen people scurrying to the MAUDE (Manufacturer and User facility Device Experience) database to make sense of what is going on. The product replacement initiated last week by Intuitive Surgical I feel is very key although the market has not responded to it.

The naysayers like Citron say that the P/E multiple should be in line with that of the medical devices industry while the yaysayers like Motley Fool contend that the numbers look good, it is the technology of the future and what more do we need.

So buy or sell?

I was very ambivalent about rat dissection in school. I was never starry-eyed about cutting up a rat and labeling its innards, I was clear I did not want to be a doctor. But Biology came easy to me, as a good middle class Indian I did not want to close a door to professional success, just like that. But I was bad at the cutting pasting, knotting and sewing kind of craft. The dissection started with one delicately pinching and pulling outward the chest skin of the rat with forceps, then making a tiny incision with the scissors. The technique now was to maneuver the scissors into this incision and through that split open the rib cage without cutting the heart. I could not do it.

I remained nonplussed until tired of my own hesitation I grabbed the rib cage with my hands and split it apart. It was neat and it worked. My dissection looked the same as everyone else but had been performed by touch rather than sight. My teacher commented as she walked by, “She will be a doctor!” I have no idea what she meant, but I wonder how many doctors depend on tactile feel for completing their surgery. Now the ones who perform traditional laparoscopy are obviously the superior craftsmen, so how about the ones who are not, who are being co-opted into new age techniques that rely on optics rather than haptics (communication by touch)? How many of them are being coerced into jumping on the new age bandwagon? Nothing wrong with that, but only some of them will be able to do it. Who is monitoring that?

It reminds me of the derivative business of banks. Derivatives have great value. They monetize risks, parcel out value and cut across market inefficiencies. But in the hands of fools and rogues it can become dangerous. More fools than rogues they.

What are derivatives? Let me give you an example. You want to buy your rented house but not at current levels. At some point the market starts to move down, down, down until at last you feel it is time to buy. But now you have a new problem; your landlord also feels that the property market cannot go any lower, or he is in the middle of a messy divorce and has no time to look at your bid. What do you do? You curse your luck of course. But what if you buy a different apartment? As and when the landlord decides he needs to sell to pay off his alimony, you could sell the apartment you had bought and buy the house. If the property market had risen like you thought, you would still make the gain on the sale of the purchased apartment, which would offset the higher costs of the house. If the reverse happened, well, you were going to buy your house at a higher price anyway.

What if you have an agent who sells apartments whose value corresponds to the house that you are trying to buy? The apartment is a derivative asset, standing in for your intended house, and the agent is your derivative salesman. But the more transactions you do, the greater are your transaction costs, and the cost of unwinding your arrangements if circumstances change. There is also the risk that the linkage between your derivative asset and the underlying asset starts to unravel. But your agents' commissions increase all the time. If apartment prices collapsed while bungalow prices skyrocketed- the agent is fine, you are the one with the big hole in your pocket. So here is a high value, high involvement, agent-intensive product, which does not reward the agent for alignment with your needs but for turnover. And if you disregard this basic fact, at some point, the sh—t will hit the fan. If a business imagines that a high involvement and high-risk product should be a revenue stream, then that business is a high-risk business.

That is what I think is happening to Intuitive. It is a high-involvement product that requires high-end practitioners and regulatory oversight, both of which are missing now. Another story where the marketing is overreaching itself. Further the product design is not being driven by the practitioner, but by the manufacturer. And for every doctor who embraces the da Vinci Robot enthusiastically, there is one who is taking it doubtfully perhaps fearfully, but the learning curve they say is steep and soon everyone is jollying alone. Until the sh—t hits the fan. This is not the iPod or the Tesla car, with its hyper perfectionist sexy bosses but a regular nuts and bolts operation, with an aggressive marketing department. I will not give it a different P/E multiple than the rest of the medical devices industry.

The Yacoubian Building - Alaa Al Aswany

The Yacoubian Building stands in downtown Cairo, a handsome Art Deco building, housing offices and some old time residents. The author, a dentist by occupation opened his first clinic here.

A building bearing the same name and perhaps modeled on the original, is the setting for the novel. 

Originally written in Arabic, it traces the lives of the various building residents. They pursue different professions, profess differing allegiances, swing different ways, but they are all united in their subjection to the Egyptian condition. That is how the book started to appear after I had gotten through a third of it—initially I thought it was a pretty, slice-of-life narrative that would affirm some fuzzy-warm, feel-good aspect of humanity. I expected an Egyptian R.K. Narayan as I took in the various characters and their back-stories, but at some point I got rather startled by the sheer carnality of the book.  I wondered among other things, about the author's attitude towards homosexuality. He implies a character turned homosexual after being abused as a child, and seems a little too fixated on the actual act. No R.K. Narayan this. It is almost as if the sexual exploitation of the poor young by the established wrinkled is the thread that binds the stories, with a few accounts of lust making in happier circumstances standing out. Tad depressing. However, the writer has a mesmeric voice and despite the all- too aggressive male gaze that informs his observations, he tells his stories with a touch of understanding and compassion. It is just enough to keep the book from becoming either a political rant or a piece for the prurient. Also, Al Aswany manages to sew up a lot of Egyptian history, politics and culture in his novel, giving one a snapshot picture of modern Cairo society. 

The book made me understand how the latest revolution had come about. Clearly even the middle classes—the ones willing to work hard and keep their head down, if only they had some prospects—had become disaffected in Egypt. In India, which is not exactly behind in the exploitation and corruption parameters, there has been some trickle down to the middle layer. Does one attribute that to democracy or press freedom or both?

 The book reads very well and the translation is superb. I love the Arabic cadence and the switch to present tense for descriptions – a West and South Asian conceit that I am much partial to.  It is important to me that the book was a runaway bestseller in the Arab world. It reminded me too much of Naguib Mahfouz’s Palace Walk, and the resonance suggests that truth is reflected in the stories of the Yacoubian Building. I can only hope the author, in his zeal had not given thought to the fact that so many shocking but perfectly conceivable stories cannot take place at once. It is a bit like ‘A Fine Balance’- almost everything bad that can happen in India happens to the four likeable protagonists of Rohington Mistry’s novel.

Yet unlike Mistry’s book, the Yacoubian building does not end in despair. It shows people acting out their wants, and at some level reconciling to their situation. They do not get a great resolution, but it could be worse.

Definitely go for the book. It speaks the truth, is racy but not a rag. And great if you want an introduction to contemporary Arab literature.

Book Clubs!

Click here to check out my blogpost in The Juhu Book Club blog. It is about Book clubs in and around Singapore.

Disgrace by JM Coetzee

In order to truly discuss a book, one has to presume prior knowledge on the part of the reader. Disgrace is such a book. I could not begin to give you the infinite twists and turns in the plot of a Satanic Verses or a Master and Margarita, but Disgrace has a straightforward narrative. To discuss the book may mean letting the story out of the bag.

JM Coetzee

Disgrace won JM Coetzee his second Booker. His Nobel thereafter, catapulted him to iconic status. The power packed economy of his writing is valuable in this busy world of low attention spans, where people want to get a million things done and contemplate the life, the universe and everything. Disgrace allows you to do just that – read a thought provoking, deep and complex novel, in the course of a short haul flight. To the plot then, and for people avoiding spoilers, they are in italics. I mean the spoilers are in italics. Mostly.

The opening:

“For a man of his age, fifty-two, divorced, he has, to his mind, solved the problem of sex rather well.”

‘He’ is David Lurie, a white man in post apartheid South Africa, a scholar and Professor, paid to teach communication when he would rather be discussing poetry. His ‘solution’ is Soraya from an escort agency. His Sorayan trysts end one day, owing to circumstances of his own making. He then starts a relationship with a young student, who nearly comes undone by the affair. An inquiry follows - Lurie refuses to apologize and is forced to resign. Footloose and fancy free, he serves up at his daughter’s small-holding where horror awaits. They are attacked in their house, his daughter Lucy is gang-raped. They do not expect justice, but it appears Lucy must make peace with her attackers, actually submit to them in a manner of speaking, if she wishes to keep her land and be safe in the new South Africa. Lurie is unable to help an increasingly remote Lucy. At the same time he begins to be drawn to the voiceless and the helpless. He helps out at an animal shelter, working hard to dispose of slaughtered stray dogs in a manner that dignifies them, he shifts the focus of his work from Byron, to Byron’s long forgotten, perhaps ridiculed mistress. He persists thus, despite a suspicion that his efforts are almost ludicrous in the context of the injustices of this world. The book comes to an end.

You would not want to read such a depressing book, but it is a real page-turner. The settings are perfectly etched, the characters credible even if their actions are at odds with one’s reasoning. We are swiftly sucked into the story and from there we ponder the themes and characters of the book-

The Problem of Sex: As a married woman maybe I have little right to judge the plight of a single man, but I come from a land where child widows had to go about with shaven heads lest they tempted someone to tempt them, if that makes sense. The western analogue-  the spinster stereotype, old, virginal, unattractive, was no less pathetic. I have felt a residue of sadness for Jane Austen and my late physically handicapped uncle who never married, but I can’t bring myself to sympathise with Lurie’s predicament. Why is he unable to take himself in hand, why does lack of ‘action’ make him go to pieces, spur him to act increasingly audaciously? Lurie’s excuse is that it is his nature, that one cannot fight one’s nature. Is that the fault of the South African experiment, to ascribe immutable natures to different people? Apartheid society failed to civilise a man like David Lurie, post-apartheid society is failing in the same way. Is that Coetzee’s point?

The book makes me think of the legitimacy of 'nature' as an argument. Are men's needs more legitimate? I wonder at the ad clip for the ethical porn site come4.org. A defiant voice-over, a rush of erotic images, mostly women, the camera finally zooming to the speaker, a wheelchair bound MAN. The site claims to support a pluralistic sexuality and is against subjugating our sexuality to marketing standards. I doubt the ad clip can reel in the women gritting their teeth on abstinence. Not, I think, with the male-centric ad, the too hip project team. If they could, they would be laughing their way to the bank – ask E.L.James.

Is David Lurie reprehensible? I did not mind David Lurie so much. First off I have the protagonist syndrome, thanks to Coetzee’s third person Lurie POV narrative. Lurie is a reliable narrator, and I am susceptible to a sensible and sensitive perspective, however flawed. That probably makes me a loser in the power stakes (it’s all about establishing one’s perspective over others, and presumption is a pre-requisite, is it not?)

No, but I get the code David Lurie lives by - the exercise of free will. If he gets carried away, it is owing to his passions, and please bear with my definition of passion: His passion makes him follow Soraya, unwanted, unasked, into her home-ground, it is his passion that makes him lose his head over Melanie. But then, his high strung nature acts as a check. I do not see him enjoying the exercise of brute force, or profiting by manipulating others. Just as his attractiveness (up until now), and the predominance of his race (up until now, which no doubt, added to his attraction-up until now), did not teach him to deal with sexual rejection, so is he incapable of going against the societal framework that has served him so well all these years. As I see it, his main fault is his ignorance of powerlessness.

My mother wonders at Soraya, a family woman leading a double life. What if she were frightened, or neurotic or otherwise stressed when Lurie calls her? He was coming close to unravelling someone’s life, playing with the life of her children. My rejoinder is that he does leave her alone in the end. More importantly he is sensitive to every subtle shift in his relationship with Soraya; and that is less aggressive and more lover-like.

David Lurie reminds me of Tony Webster, the protagonist of Julian Barnes’s Sense of an Ending – both men have the same smug air of self-sufficiency. There is a further parallel in their having to face up to their past deeds, although Coetzee is harsher with Lurie than Barnes is with Webster. Lurie gets everything back a thousand fold. If he is predatory in his relationships, his daughter gets raped, if he blames his nature, his daughter is raped by Pollux who can’t help his mental deficiency! But Lurie shows character in adversity. His apology to Melanie’s family is a counterpoint to his refusal to abase himself before the inquiry committee. By the way, I admire his attitude with the committee. I prefer arrogance to hypocrisy.

And yes he finds Melanie’s sister attractive and he disapproves of unattractive women, but come on, I will not find fault with what people think inside their heads. We can allow their nature that much! He is not a Humbert Humbert either, Melanie is much older than Lolita. And remember Lurie’s ex-wife is a friend. In fact, my heart goes out to Lurie, singing for Byron’s forgotten mistress, to a three-legged dog. I wish I could tell him it is not comic, the tinny banjo strain. There is a key line in the book, a part of Lurie’s inner monologue – he (Lurie) can, if he concentrates, if he loses himself, be there, be the men, inhabit them, fill the men with the ghost of himself. The question is does he have it in him to be the woman? My verdict is that Coetzee can be the aggressor through Lurie, only up to a point. To the women then.  

Melanie’s inexplicable behaviour: Melanie comes from a provincial family, she is inexperienced and possibly in awe of her professor, maybe she even crushed on Lurie- he first finds her dawdling in his path, she has spoken of him to her family. While her father speaks in stock phrases (we put our children in your hands, nest of vipers, so help me God, how the mighty have fallen, break bread with us), Lurie’s terse apology, contains one exquisite line, the confession that ‘he lacked the lyrical. (Of course he continues to lack the lyrical, to intrude, disturb, explain, demand indulgence. The lyrical would require him to be silent.) But Lurie's  sophistication and sensitivity must be attractive to Melanie. His lifestyle, his books, his erudition, his experience of the world must be glamorous, even heady. The rub is that she finds him physically unattractive. 

But does she like his company? Does she end up accepting that the cost of his company, this introduction to a rarefied life, or let us take a different scenario, the cost of obtaining refuge from her own complicated or banal life, is to agree to have sex with him? And does that capitulation undo her? And him too? For lacking the lyrical?

I left IIT after two months because I lacked the vocabulary to tell my father I was really happy at the Institute, that I thought that if I worked hard I could get into the coveted engineering program. I felt no legitimacy in my arguments, it seemed spoilt of me to refuse a seat in the medical college. Moreover I was worried about the Electrical Circuits Test. Why was that? Because when my father arrived at my hostel to take me back to Chennai where the medical college awaited me, I wasted five minutes bursting into tears. Then I remembered that my professor had threatened to mark us as absent if we were more than five minutes late, so I missed the entire class, which I decided would surely set me back in the coming test, which meant I had even less of a leg to stand on if my plan was to get a branch change. So I advanced no sensible arguments, only threw a super tantrum, hoping my father would say Amrish-Puri-like , “Ja Simran ja, yeh KGP jaise koi tere ko khush nai rakh saktha, ja, apni zindagi jee”. (Go Simran, go. No one can keep you happy like KGP does. Go live your life) My nod to that silly movie DDLJ. In the movie it is  Raj not KGP. Check out the link below.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0Zc5m0w6gA

My father did nothing of that sort, instead he kept asking me what I wanted!

Sorry for that autobiographical dose, but the point is that those five minutes became a missed test, which made me believe that my career in IIT was finished and that I had to go elsewhere. We make decisions for the vaguest of reasons in our youth and our folly. Maybe Melanie wanted to get away from her boyfriend, maybe she felt let down by Lurie, maybe the missed test became a big deal, to the point where she became confused within and buffeted by all without. Melanie Isaacs is out of her depth from the beginning, but it is Lurie’s fault in not grasping that her problems could become his problem. 

Melanie is probably 'Coloured'. I don’t know much of South African society but if Lurie, a poor professor, represents a certain world, then the hard working petit bourgeois Isaacs household with their pickles and cumin flavoured chicken stew must come from somewhere else. And not just that, the overt religiosity, the bombast that reflects a limited vocabulary, Desiree’s  now-now, the Chinese features of both the sisters, Isaacs’s hairless skin, the dark hair, the dark eyes, Ryan the boyfriend’s warning to Lurie – stay with your own kind - I am sure of it. I will not even go into the play on Melanie’s name.

Disgrace was made into a movie starring John Malkovich as David Lurie. Good Casting!

Lucy’s inexplicable behaviour: It is clear that both Lucy and Melanie are unhappy with the sexual advantage that has been taken of them, yet they acquiesce to it in a most troubling way. I think Coetzee has inhabited Melanie very well- how about Lucy? Why is she willing to abase herself? Why is Bev complicit in Lucy’s harebrained decisions? Has Lucy’s sexual orientation made her differently attuned to life? Is it PSTD? I cannot answer these questions. But clearly Holland is not her idea of a safe haven like Lurie and the reader think it is. On the other hand she had found happiness working the land in South Africa and thinks she can give it a go, with the help of Petrus. Her father cannot help, he is increasingly irrelevant, jobless himself, his house in town burgled. Yet…how is she so placid when Pollux is found peeping into her bathroom, so irritated with her father for interfering? How does she end up pregnant? Is it a bid to tie the land to herself, produce a child of the soil? Will she be successful? Is she bending to the wind or has she been broken? Will she rise again?

Lastly, the character of Petrus: – I did not like him. It is all right to say my people, your people and propose all kinds of arrangements, but Petrus knows what he is about, and if he cannot  see it, he is no better than Pollux, the jackal boy. I am not a white or black man, I am a brown woman and Coetzee can show me all the parallels between Lurie and Petrus, I will not be lured by that kind of sophistry. Maybe Petrus and Isaacs are projections of Lurie, but if so, Lurie has done a good job of convincing me.

So?

But where is the story going? Where is the disgrace in the transfer of power? I have to agree with TS from the book group that perhaps it is the story of South Africa. It is an indictment of South Africa, of the apartheid system that allowed men like Lurie advantages, of the current law and order situation that has reduced Lucy, a good woman to such abject straits. Like all of Coetzee’s works, it is a protest and a cry on behalf of the voiceless- Lucy and the dogs, Byron’s Teresa and men like Lurie who are unable to age gracefully.  Advocacy at its finest.

And I like that semi colons have been dispensed with, that commas are the way to go. Oh, and I love the creative process as Coetzee describes it, apropos ‘Byron’s Italy,’ the opera that consumes Lurie as the book draws to a close.  I could go on. I could transcribe the book.

Read the book every five years. 

VIEWS AND REVIEWS: Sanskrit literature

VIEWS AND REVIEWS: Sanskrit literature

Sanskrit literature

We had a little discussion on Sanskrit the other day, and I was asked to send in my notes to the group. Since I want to increase my blog readership, I decided to post my stuff! I will try my best not to say things most people already know.

The word Sanskrit refers to that, which has been ‘put together’.  (It happens to have the same meaning as the Greek syncretismos although the origin for the Greek word is attributed to the term for the Cretan Federation. Someone better challenge that etymology quick! To my laywoman’s way of thinking, the root word obviously comes from a proto Indo-European language.) We infer that Sanskrit is a language that has been crafted according to scientific principles, synthesized if you please, as opposed to Prakrit, which refers to language that evolves naturally (from Prakriti or nature). Sanskrit has always been a language of learning and refinement in India. The Prakrits were therefore not derivatives of Sanskrit (most probably the other way round), but simply the less hidebound easy-speak version of the same language. Prakrit and Sanskrit were mutually intelligible when our Indo-European ancestors first came to the sub-continent, but Prakrit being natural and not controlled by convention, evolved (but naturally!) giving rise to various dialects which ultimately transmogrified (Calvin, right?) into the various North Indian regional languages. The evolution was apparently slowest in the Gandharan region and fastest in Magadha. I suppose that means Kashmiri is closest to the old Prakrit, and therefore Sanskrit, while maybe Bhojpuri is the farthest. (Just hazarding baba. I know no Kashmiri or Bhojpuri). Sanskrit is regarded as the mother language of the North Indian languages, from Kashmiri to Bengali, much like Latin and the Romance languages – French, Italian, and Spanish.

Geographical spread of Indo European languages in the Old World. Indo-European is spoken by 3 billion native speakers. Grey is the non Indo-European world. Brown shows the Indo-Iranian branch of the family  that contains Sanskrit, Persian. Blue is the Italic (Romance) Family, Red is Germanic, Green is Balto-Slavic, Yellow is Greek.

Sanskrit is an Indo-European language. This means that it shares a common parent language with other languages of the Indo-European/Indo-Germanic family. Of course all of us have always been struck by the incredible similarities between the different languages of the family. Pater in Latin is Father in English is Pitareh in Sanskrit. Mater, Mother, Maatereh. Brother, Braathereh. Path-पथ, Go-गो, este- अस्‌ित, we found this game very exciting as children, until my dad pointed out that Fart and पाद probably have the same roots too. He felt we were getting carried away. Point noted but not taken. Excuse our Hindi. And English.

Sanskrit writing system–Originally, Sanskrit was intended to be transmitted orally. Megasthenes the Greek ambassador to Pataliputra mentions that the Indians have no writing system! So Chanakya literally composed the Arthashastra off the top of his head, and kept it inside his disciples' heads? Incredible. And we think the Chinese strange, sticking to their pictorial script for communication! In the peripatetic pre-paper and pre-printing era, it was easier to remember stuff than carry notes around I guess. I must say it is taking me much longer to write all this down. Definitely more than the 15 minutes I took to say it.

One uncharitable motivation for this oral tradition could have been that it ensured knowledge remained the preserve of a select few. There was no danger of it reaching the ‘masses’. (The horror of the masses remains the Indian intellectual’s greatest drawback. Just saying.) So, to decipher the language was not enough in those times, unless you got a teacher who imparted the know-how, orally. Apropos the Guru-Sishya Parampara. Remember how Karna and Ekalavya struggled without a teacher? Not like today, when mere paas Wikipedia hai!

Asokan edict in Brahmi

In fact scripts were first used for the Prakrits, by royal dynasties that obviously had to connect to their subjects. It was only later, that the body of Sanskrit literature, starting with the Vedas were redacted (meaning compiled, or reduced to writing), possibly in competitive response to a resurgent Prakrit writing tradition taking off, especially with the advent of Buddhism and Jainism that were not so bought into the casteist traditions of ancient India. The script adopted was usually the local Prakrit script of the scribe, from Kharoshti in the North West to Brahmi in the main subcontinent. (The point is not that no script existed, but that our intellectual forefathers sneered at the technology, preferring to rely on their memory. Statement thing, like not being on Facebook.) The Brahmi script had descendants – in the north, the Gupta, Sharada and Devnagari scripts came about in the 5^th, 7^th and 11^th centuries of the Common Era; Grantham and Vattezhuththu came up between the 6^th and 8^th centuries in the South and spread to South East Asia through trade contacts, giving rise to the Burmese Mon script as well as the Khmer and Javanese scripts. Modern Thai comes from Khmer that comes from Vattezhuththu. Brahmi was the man. Or woman, likelier. (The Hiragana, phonetic system of Japanese writing is attributed to women; their men thought it was cooler to struggle with Kanji, which is the same as the Chinese logographic script.)

The Indus Valley script has not been deciphered yet. It could have been a precursor to Brahmi

I digress. Point is that Sanskrit did not pay much heed to the script used, although correct pronunciation was of paramount importance. In the nineteenth century Occidental Indologists found this lack of a uniform writing system an impediment to their research and promoted the use of the Nagari system. Hamare paas guru nahin par empire hai, they said.

Body of Sanskrit literature:

The non-reliance on a script has infused some unique features into Sanskrit literature. The earlier works are mostly metrical compositions with mnemonics interwoven to facilitate memorization. Sanskrit does not depend on syntax to convey meaning, and every word has a vast number of synonyms to facilitate composition into a metrical scheme (the number of synonyms frustrated foreign students like the 11^th century scholar Al Beruni who wrote his ‘India’ for the Islamic world.)

Sanskrit literature may be seen as belonging to different eras starting with the Pre-Classical era or Vedic era. Reliance was solely on oral transmission and the writing was essentially religious, philosophic or scientific. Around the 5^th or 6^th century BCE, Panini standardized the grammar for Sanskrit. With the Gupta Empire ensuring peace and stability and prosperity, many works were written. The period between 300 BCE and 800 CE is called the Classical Sanskrit era. Then there is the Later period. Important works in more or less chronological order are as follows-

Rig Veda in Nagari - ca 19th cent. CE

Rig Veda – “Praise” - A collection of hymns in praise of the gods, mythological accounts for the origin of the world, prayers for prosperity etc., composed between 1700 BC and 1100 BC, redacted in 1000 BC and written down ca 400 CE.

Yajurveda: Composed between 1000BC and 600 BC it is the liturgical knowledge for conducting sacrifices, the mantras etc. Will have a lot of mathematics, like the formulae for constructing an altar etc.

Samveda- Melody is emphasized; these are hymns.

Atharva Veda- Dealt among other things, in magic, healing, warfare, philosophy etc. Seems secular to me.

The Vedas usually come in a set – the Samhita, that is the main collection of the metrical material itself, and the Brahmana, which is the commentary on the material, often in prose. Aranyakas and the early Upanishads are also seen as part of the Brahmanas, although of course, there are always works that straddle periods and classifications. The Upanishads or Vedanta are a set of philosophical treatises, which form the theoretical basis for Hinduism. They were composed over a wide swathe of time, from the Pre-Buddhist Period.

Sutra literature: Knowledge codified in metrical material, composed between 500 and100 BCE, concision being of importance. Includes the Vedangas consisting of manuals on astrology, metrics, domestic life etc. etc. Panini’s Ashtadhyayi is an example of the Vyakarana Sutra. Panini standardized Sanskrit grammar through his brilliant Ashtadhyayi that works through examples.

The Epics: – The Ramayana and the Mahabharata were composed and redacted between 600 BCE and 100 BCE. These are described as Itihasa, “It happened thus”, i.e. history.

Classical Sanskrit Literature: 300 BCE to 800 CE.

The main works of this era are –

Epic Poetry (Mahakavya): Western scholars refer to this as Court Poetry, since the hero is usually either godly or Kshatriya. Since everything was composed metrically, poetry, especially epic poetry was distinguished by certain identifying features, that I will not go into, as Ranjani has already done this. One important aspect was the technical virtuosity of the Mahakavis. They were not shy of showing off either. The great epic poems of this time are – Kalidasa’s ‘Kumarasambhava’ and ‘Raghuvamsa’, Bharavi’s ‘Kiratarjunaya’, Maagha’s ‘Shishupaala Vadha’, ‘Naishada-charita’, and ‘Bhattikavya’.

Lyric poetry (Khandakavya): ‘Meghadootam’ and ‘Ritusamharam’ by Kalidasa are superb examples. Bhartrihari’s ‘Shringarashataka’ is a contemplation on erotic sentiment.

Ethical poetry, as the name suggests, is  exclusively devoted to poetic aphorisms, (anyway found abundantly in Sanskrit literature) e.g. Bhartrihari’s ‘Nitishataka’ and ‘Vairagyashataka’. Yes it’s the same poet. He turned monk and then layman and back and fluctuated thus seven times between his house and the monastery. The substance of his work would have also been inconstant.

Fiction

Raja Ravi Varma's Shakuntala

Vasantasena

Drama: Kalidasa, Bana, Ashvaghosha, Shudraka were the big playwrights.  The most lauded are Kalidasa’s plays from ‘Malavikagnimitram’ to ‘Abhigyan Shakuntalam’. ‘Mrichchakatikam’ is one of the oldest plays and was made into the Hindi movie – Utsav. The Amar Chitra Katha Vasantasena, will give you the plot. I can't help giving a nod to Uncle Pai of Amar Chitra Katha (www.amarchitrakatha.com) who familiarised half a generation of Indian kids with their heritage and their culture.

 My personal favourite is Bana’s Swapnavasavadatta–the story of Vasavadatta and Udayana, which reads like an ancient times Bold and the Beautiful. Harsha’s Ratnavali, however, was like a sequel with different actors and poor continuity. Apparently Harsha’s works were lauded not as much for his hackneyed plots as for his brisk dialogue and knowledge of stagecraft. His Nagananda is seen as a brilliant play, however, departing from the stereotypical, and combining Buddhist philosophy with a Hindu Devi ex machina! 

Story Collections: Panchatantra (in prose with an admixture of verse), Hitopedesha (in prose with even more sententious verse), are the primary examples– These are stories with a lesson. These are actually seen as part of Niti-Shastra, (see down, under Shastra in Non Fiction).  The Vikram Vetal stories (Chandamama anyone?), The stories of Vikramaditya’s throne, and The Stories of the Parrot are other short prose collections.

Novel: The first Sanskrit novelist would be Bana Bhatta who wrote Kadambari in 6^th-7^th centuries CE. He was in Harsha's court and author of Swapnavasavadatta.

Non-Fiction 

Scholarly treatises – Shastras, Tantras, Siddhanta and Jataka, on topics ranging from astronomy to mathematics to sexual congress. The Aryabhatiyam for example contains mathematical formulae in 33 verses! By the way Aryabhata left out the proofs in his Ganitapada, and it is thought that the teacher would have supplied those – see the unwillingness to let go? However from Bhaskara’s time in 600 CE, derivations were given in prose form! Tantras were mystical/scientific/ magical works and composed within the Hindu and Buddhist canon through the classical period.

Aryabhatta's sloka approximating π 

It transalates as follows and indicates the use of π : Add 4 to 100, multiply by 8, then add 62000, then divide by 20000. The result is "approximately" circumference of a circle of diameter 20000. 

The ‘Kamasutra’ by Vatsyayana would fall under the category of Kama-shastra. It is written in prose with poetic interpolations, and may have been composed between 400-200 BCE. It might have been collected into a compendium in 200 BCE. There are other works that fall under Kama-shastra.

Puranas: Our corpus of mythological and historical literature, written in verse form, dates between the 3^rd and 10^th century CE when the divergence of Shaivism and Vaishnavism emerged. Deals with creation of life, the various eras and genealogies.

Later Sanskrit literature – 800 CE to 1100 CE

A later, but important story collection is the Kathasaritasagara, written in verse, and adapted from the legendary Brihatkatha (lost work in Paisachi, a Prakrit dialect). Vikram Seth was only following in the footsteps of his ancestors.

Jayadeva’s Gita Govinda, describes the love story of Radha and Krishna in melodic and beautiful Sanskrit. Avadhuta Gita attributed to Dattatreya is a work of philosophy from this period that had a huge impact on the development of the Advaita philosophy.

There was a decline after the eleventh century coinciding with the rise of local dialects (the local Prakrits) that had so veered away from their original form that they were mutually unintelligible with Sanskrit and had a separate tradition of literature. But Sanskrit continued to be used for religious and philosophical literature and remained an inspiration for the vernacular literature of India.

Reference: Wikipedia zindabad. 

I also liked History of Sanskrit literature by Arthur Macdonnell http://www.gutenberg.org/files/41563/41563-h/41563-h.htm#contents

American Pastoral by Philip Roth

When I read a book, my head swims with ideas and questions and a multiple other troubling matters. The more a book worries me, the less am I willing to ‘like’ it. (Like how I am uable to let go after my reread of Disgrace. I will have to either read ‘Scenes from Provincial Life’ or ‘Gone Girl’ before I am fit for society.) And that is exactly what has happened with American Pastoral, Philip Roth’s 1997 offering and part of his great American trilogy (with The Human Stain, and ‘I married a Communist’). I was hooked from Chapter 1, then set adrift, leaving me flailing for concrete ground. Hmmm, let me quit the high-flown semantics, quickly get to the meat of the story. We can analyze and argue later.

American Pastoral is narrated by Nathan Zuckerman, fictional writer, and Roth’s alter ego. Zuckerman is in his seventies here, a survivor of prostate surgery that has left him impotent and weak of bladder, a solitary pathetic figure nourished we presume, only by his writer’s curiosity and the satisfaction of regularly realizing his creative potential. Nathan runs into a man from his past, Seymour ‘The Swede’ Levov, who their entire Newark neighborhood once idolized, apparently because he was blonde, blue eyed, steep jawed and fantastic in sports. Believable enough; it is pointed out anyway that in those high school days of the forties, when Zuckerman’s ilk of second generation Jewish immigrants had just stepped onto the first rung in the ladder to assimilation, Swede Levov appeared to have arrived there already, showing them that it could be done. (One also infers that Levov’s lack of swagger imbued him with an aura: of the established one, of, should I say it, the well meaning, reticent Anglo Saxon at the top of the food chain!)

But on meeting him after all these years the star-struck Nathan is disappointed to find a bland, self-satisfied man, insisting on rubbing the lonely Zuckerman nose in cozy photographs and triumphant tales of family achievement. Zuckerman responds by consigning Levov to the boring platitude spouting multitude, one beneath the eagle eye of the author-narrator. However, a co-incidental meeting a few years later, makes Zuckerman realize how utterly wrong he has been in his reading, for the Swede, despite his obvious success in the diverse fields of sport and business and love, had been laid low by his beloved daughter’s destiny. Perhaps she had brought her fate upon herself, but it is no less horrifying to a parent for all that. That piques Zuckerman’s interest and he sets about dreaming up a ‘plausible’ version of what could have happened, a version that forms the substance of the book.

Philip Roth

How plausible Roth is, is borne out by the reception his book has received, for it cannot all be attributed to virtuosity, however much one likes the author’s gorgeous rants, or finds evocative the human interaction portrayed, or thinks interesting the descriptions of human endeavor – cattle farming, plastic surgery, glove making, feeding cake, take your pick. The American Pastoral has remained one of the most widely read and critically acclaimed American novels to date, and this will have to be because Roth writes the truth. But why am I not satisfied? Is it because in the best traditions of contemporary novelists he refuses to make one point (you already know I am thinking Disgrace here), but starts up a story abounding in any number of points, if only you picked them up? Is this the fate of the novel in the post analytic world where even evil has been teased into nothingness, where the author inevitably loses his direction? Yes, I have digressed here.

Back to the book. Just like the framing device of the novel is handled by Nathan Zuckerman, the body proper of American Pastoral is told from the bewildered perspective of Swede Levov, who while dealing with the aftermath of his daughter Meredith-Merry’s violent revolt, tries to understand what went wrong. In doing so he gives us nuggets to sift through the filter of our own experience, knowing as we do, the ultimate dénouement, (a brief history of Swede Levov’s life is contained in the “prologue”). Swede Levov goes back and forth in time, reveling in fond memories of an uncomplicated past, speculating on the reasons for his daughter’s breakdown - whether it was the lack of a religious foundation, or her being an only child, or her stuttering disability and perhaps their less than perfect parenting response to it, (but then again, who could claim perfect parenting strategies), or a very inappropriate kiss between Swede and a growing Merry (now this one is more worrisome). We get sucked into the game, as he anguishes. Is the Swede too smug, too unwilling to see a problem until it hits him on the head? Does he mirror the American experience? The Swede is constantly surprised by people around him – he does not worry that an intelligent, stuttering child of clearly glamorous parents could be miserable, thinking it enough that he finds her wonderful, he has no idea how important lack of appearance (of looks, class, and intellectual achievement) is to him and to his wife, he is not riled by the nasty remarks of the incorrigible Marcia Umanoff, most importantly he is not goaded by the violence coursing around him, so apparent in the bizarre events of the dinner he hosts towards the end of the book. 

We also wonder if the Swede’s moving away from his tribe (a Jewish identity), in the name of an assimilation that has not really happened, creates a vacuum in his child’s life that she tries to fill with her own individually created belief systems? Or is it only a case of crisis paralysis, for as the book progresses, Swede Levov seems unable to take any coherent action vis-à-vis his daughter. I could not help taking my musings further- so much land and so few people - you either farm the land or you squire it, or you move beyond the suburban. Is America creating little family islands brooding in provincial isolation, tinderboxes ready to explode anyway? It is amazing that one can get so carried away about the imaginary doings of imaginary characters. 

But still. Kuch khatakta hai. Ennomo neruderethey! And the more I think, the more I feel that it is the character of the Swede that does not sit right for me. He sounds wonderfully good childy in his John Appleseed fantasy, right up to when his daughter reaches adolescence. But is it possible that such a man would achieve all his dreams? In my limited experience, our gifts and talents give us a start in life, but what one makes of a business or a marriage requires character, and while self-delusion helps, it is never enough. The Swede could not have been such a babe in the woods, such an innocent if he came this far. And I do get it; there is an underside to him, steely or weak you decide, the side that does not see alternative scenarios, that walks away from a broken engagement, a broken marriage, the faith. I suppose he finds it more difficult to walk away from a broken child, but would such a character anguish like that? Who knows? I had to ask others. 

Tarun was like – Swede Levov realizes that he cannot accommodate his daughter in the life he has made for himself, and that is his tragedy. Alright. I went to the book discussion. 

Madelyn felt the book was pitch perfect in its portrayal of America. Having grown up in a New York neighborhood next door to many Jewish families, she could identify with the setting and that in itself, was exhilarating. Madelyn also found the development of the novel symptomatic of what she felt was happening in America, ‘the descent of the collective dream of the American Pastoral into the individual American berserk’. She appreciated also, how American history had been swept into the scope of this novel –World War II, the race riots, the Vietnam war, the weathermen, Angela Davis, the sexual revolution, the Watergate scandal. If Madelyn had to pick one inexplicable wrong move – by Levov/ Zuckerman/ Roth, it would be the kiss. She could not see how such deviance could so normally be woven into the story. My take is that the Swede gives himself away in more ways than one, through that incestuous kiss – in effect it is an admission that Merry’s stuttering is a terrible affliction that needs drastic recompense. I have to admit however, that the episode came across rather self consciously clever in a post Freudian way.  In the tradition of Woody Allen and Portnoy… 

I saw also in Roth’s writing, a delineation of the Jewish identity, how it explained many things to me, and how uncomfortable that made me. I did not need these sociological inputs about a people after the history lesson of Master and Margarita. Does reading great fiction make one an armchair ethnologist? Mamta asked how this story would have panned out in an Indian context- she felt an Indian middle class household would have never moved beyond Meredith, her story would have become theirs. Shivalik felt that the novel was really about America, the story of a nation that discovers itself veering off a blameless course to a happy ideal, as it gets blindsided by events. Possible. The sweep of the novel is American; why should there not be an allegorical significance?

 

Of course everyone wondered about Merry’s breakdown and the causes for that- the mother, the lax upbringing, an isolated life. It was interesting that I had read ‘Some Girls’ by Jillian Lauren just a week before starting American Pastoral.

 

'Some girls' is the memoir of a suburban New Jersey girl who rebelled against her Jewish middle class parents and ended up in the sex trade, ultimately landing in the harem of a Brunei prince. As airport reads go, it is superbly written, but what I took away, was that a kid from a perfectly boring-normal western background, brought up by well meaning reasonable parents could end up as the pet of a bored sultan. There are similarities between Merry and Jillian. Both of them felt disconnected at home perhaps, (Merry because of her insecurities, Jillian because she was adopted), both grew up in very well off Jewish households but in cosmopolitan neighborhoods; they probably felt alienated from their suburban peers. But more interesting was the difference between the real and fictional stories of a girl gone wrong. There was real violence in Jillian’s home. That key ingredient for someone to become unhinged - Roth hints at sexual abuse, but he is half hearted about it, would it have made sense instead, to have hinted at violence in the home?

I cannot end the review without registering a protest against the portrayal of a religion so moderate in its outlook as a kooky violent group, even from the warped perspective of a demented Meredith. Jains are vegetarians but scrupulously clean, but more importantly a basic tenet of their faith is ‘anekantavada’. Anekāntavāda encourages its adherents to consider the views and beliefs of their rivals and opposing parties. Proponents of anekāntavāda apply this principle to religion and philosophy, reminding themselves that any religion or philosophy—even Jainism—that clings too dogmatically to its own tenets, is committing an error based on its limited point of view. Roth could have surely picked another religion to project as fanatic. Maybe he was being ironical.

But the book makes you think. It is important and readable. Pick it up.