Gene Machine

Venkataraman (Venki) Ramakrishnan (2018). Gene Machine, HarperCollins India, pp. 272

A great way to begin your book journey this year would be with this highly accessible memoir of a journey in science by the 2009 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry and Cambridge Molecular Biologist Venki Ramakrishnan who uncovered the structure of ribosome. Arguably, the greatest discovery in structural biology since Watson and Crick decoded the double helix of DNA, unearthing the structure of ribosome had two important effects on research in biology. The first was to bring back to research focus the evolutionary link that RNA is and the second to point to the future where proteins dominate gene action.

This book is about Ramakrishnan’s personal journey from being a graduate student in Physics in the 1970s USA, who switched disciplines (Physics to Biology) and continents (US to the UK) and how it made him the dark horse in the race to uncover the central dogma of life. This book reads like a racy thriller at times bringing to light how scientific communities work through collaboration and competition through the generosity of strangers and animosity of colleagues to piece together a complex puzzle amidst the business and politics of science as it is done today.

Ramakrishnan writes with self-deprecating wry humour and acknowledges the importance of a number of teams of people who helped in solving the puzzle one clear insight at a time. This generous acknowledgement of people (often with photographs) make the work tender and human despite the dark sides of human ambition (including his own) that he portrays vividly and honestly. In the process, he raises some larger questions that is worth pondering about.

The first of these is about how conservative and conformist the prizes in science are today, behaving like clubs, acknowledging some types of ideas (and therefore people) over others, institutionalizing elitism that penalizes outsiders and young researchers. This discussion highlights how assumptions are made about the worthiness of a scientific contribution, the arbitrary rules that supports these assumptions, how science progresses through ‘fashionable ideas and big funding’ over small and meaningful group collaboration.

The second insight is about how scientific discovery essentially works in today’s world- with the old-school long and hard work, the role of luck, the cost of errors and the strength of genuine human solidarity beyond the acrimonious race to the finish.

This is a book that is intensely personal and immensely impersonal at the same time, written after critical reflection and with honesty and deep concern by a gifted scientist and writer. What better way to kick start a new year than the story of human suffering and success, personal victory and historic glory, private curiosity leading up to human quest to know beauty and truth? Happy 2019!

India through 50 Lives

Sunil Khilnani (2016), Incarnations, Allen Lane, pp. 636

This book is an excellent introduction to the history of India through the lives of 50 individuals who shaped its destiny. Based on the BBC Radio 4 Series, the book traces the period from ancient to modern India, from Buddha and Ashoka to Raj Kapoor and Dhirubhai Ambani to understand the transformation that the subcontinent has gone through and the ideas it offered the world. This is considering that biography as a modern genre is not popular or prolific in Asian history.

The great thing about such a portfolio view of history is that it goes for rich and rare details of the protagonists and puts a human face to the historical incidents. The prose is lively and you turn the page quite naturally to finish large chunks of the tome at one go.  The photos that accompany each piece is equally captivating from classic portraits and paintings to contemporary stills populating the album.

I found a couple of things not adding up for me. For instance, although 50 portraits are taken, the reason for selection is not explicitly mentioned. As a result, you do end up with an eclectic mix of the very celebrated figures like Gandhi and Buddha, the relatively unknown ones such as eighteenth-century artist Nainsukh and nineteenth-century photographer Deen Dayal with the very problematic individuals V.K. Krishna Menon, English Sanskritist William Jones and Ethiopian slave turned strategist Malik Ambar. I did not understand the justification of such inclusion at the expense of some other equally influential individuals. Second, although fields as varied as science, politics, cinema and business find place in the book, the absence of sports stars is inexplicable. And finally, nearly all the ‘experts’ who comment on each of the historic characters are based out of Western universities. This is particularly jarring because some of the best classicists and art historians are to be found within the country, although they may not be proficient in English. Considering the scale and financial scope of the project, such selectivity is not easily excused.

Even then, the book calls for a fascinating read to both Indophiles and neophytes attempting to understand the history and heritage of India. I’d finish the year off with a giant book (at 600+ pages) like this!

Beauty and the Universe

Frank Wilczek (2018), A Beautiful Question, Penguin Allen Lane, New Delhi, pp. 436

Does the world embody beautiful ideas? Is the world a work of art? Is the creator primarily an artist? These are the fundamental questions that Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek asks in his book A Beautiful Question. In this tour de force of physics’ quest to understand the creative principle of the universe, Wilczek takes us from Pythagoras to quantum mechanics to understand the fundamental concepts that explain the origin and existing conditions of the universe and the aesthetic appeal inherent in these ideas.

From Pythagoras to Quantum Physics

This book picks out some of the most important arguments from historical figures to support its basic thesis. In this journey, we cover geometry, physics, music and the arts in a veritable tour of renaissance. We begin with Pythagoras and his idea that ‘all things are numbers’, a principle that connects mind, matter and beauty. Then, we move to Platonic solids and the idea of symmetry as a principle of beauty. Brunelleschi and his projective geometry help us through to Newton and his novel method of scientific analysis. Here, we encounter dynamic laws of change as opposed to the statist ideals of Plato and Pythagoras. The tension between the ideal and the real is a constant theme that runs through the book. From Newton, we move to Maxwell (who is portrayed with a great deal of creative empathy) and his unification theory to culminate in quantum fulfilment. At the end of this rewarding journey, we do emphatically arrive at the conclusion that beauty is a fundamental principle in the forces that created and run the universe. The last chapter is a sober reminder that it is in this beautiful universe that all the pain and suffering exist too.

Wilczek helpfully simplifies the more complex portion of his arguments especially in the last part of the book that describes quantum physics and its evolution. I found it coming rather rapidly at me as compared to the more languorous description of Pythagoras and Plato in the beginning (caveat: I did science in college!). What worked for me was that I could come back to those parts along with their insightful illustrations and work it out till I understood the basic argument. Let me add that the illustrations are so integrally woven with the intellectual fabric of the book that it adds a touch of humanness to the historical figures and explains complex scientific experiments through interesting visual portrayal. I was particularly fascinated by a page from Issac Newton’s notebook reproducing the conjectures about his experiments in his own hand and young Maxwell ruminating with his colour top. Both in terms of its fundamental thesis and its production values, this is an exhaustive introduction to the aficionado. To the skeptical lay person, I’d say, go for it with an open mind with the confidence that this question is too interesting to give it a miss!

Gandhi’s Religion

JTF Jordens (1998). Gandhi’s Religion: A Homespun Shawl, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, pp. 340

As we celebrate Mahatma Gandhi’s sesquicentennial birth anniversary on 2 October this year, it is a great time to revisit his life and works. A quintessential introduction of his works would begin with his autobiography (The Story of my Experiments with Truth), personal portraits by his grandson Rajmohan Gandhi (The Good Boatman and Mohandas: A True Story of a Man, His People and an Empire) and the two-volume biography by Ramachandra Guha (Gandhi before India and Gandhi: The Years that Changed the World). Furthermore, his entire oeuvre of 98 volumes is open for the patient scholar (Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, vol 1-98). Gandhi’s faith seems to be somewhat of an enigma when compared to his political ideas because it evolved as a syncretic mix of various philosophical strands. More importantly, it evolved in the peculiar manner in which Gandhi’s ideas shaped up - through a curious back and forth between philosophy and practice. 

With a helpful introduction of the author and the context of the work by historian Ramachandra Guha, this book is an excellent tour-de-force of Gandhi’s religious ideas. Beginning as a non-committal youth in London, Gandhi’s first foray into religion as a young adult was through meeting with Theosophists and the vegetarianism movement. Following this experience, his years in South Africa as a lawyer and public activist made him question his own limited grasp of Hinduism, a religion into which he was born. Gandhi sought advice on religious philosophy from a practising Jain ascetic which had a profound impact on the way he interpreted Hinduism in his later years. Jainism which emphasised rational thinking, non-violent conduct and enlightenment of the self as highest ideals appealed to Gandhi’s sense of ethics and the way he conducted his politics. His eclectic reading and friendship across religious boundaries influenced him as he formulated his own ideas about God and the first principles of ethical conduct.  These experiments spanning diet, sex, health, prayer and manual labour became an enduring exploration of truth and meaning.

This book is divided into three parts each focusing on three different periods in Gandhi’s life- South Africa, initial years in India and religion in action during the national movement in India. Jordens relies on the extensive corpus of Gandhi’s own writing as collected in his works as well as the numerous letters in which he corresponded with his mentors, followers and adversaries. Relying on such first-hand account, Jordens deftly brings out the evolution of his thoughts and neatly summarises them at the end of each chapter and substantially in the last chapter. A great introduction to Gandhi and his experiments with religion!

View from the Left

EMS Namboodirippad (2010), History, Society and Land Relations, New Delhi: LeftWord books, pp. 239.

EMS Namboodirippad was the leader of the first democratically elected Communist government in the world when he became the first chief minister of Kerala in southern India in 1957. A political leader and a Marxist thinker of immense influence, his essays are a great introduction to his critical approach to understanding Indian society and history. This is one of the two books of his collected essays in English (the other being The Frontline Years), both published by LeftWord. For the student who is interested in Indian history and society, his work is valuable because EMS was that rare breed of practitioner-theoretician, who had at his disposal data and field observations of considerable scale. Furthermore, he chose to analyze them academically, making the sources of his data and the methodology employed transparent. This is especially evident in his examination of the question of land ownership and social classes, a problem still relevant in many developing countries today.

The core thesis

This book contains 14 essays and one interview. The essays thematically span Marxist analysis of history (3 essays), the question of caste, class and the Indian national question (6 essays) and a detailed examination of the feudal system and land relations in Kerala (3 essays). There are two odd essays- one on the Marxist interpretation of the separation of idealist and materialist philosophy in India and the other on the possible trajectories of evolution of the Indian judiciary.

The core thesis of EMS’ analysis is that he sees Asian societies as exception (along with Germanic, Slavonic and Ancient classical societies) to the linear evolution of history from primitive communism to slavery, feudalism and capitalism of the European kind that Marx argued. Relying on Marx’s Notes (1956-57), EMS contends that these societies underwent a different form of transition into ‘village societies’ that was crucial in deploying property relations differently and eschewing slavery and serfdom. For example, in these societies, the individuals are never fully separated from the society and are tied by bonds of kinship or locality. Furthermore, property claims in land is differentiated from that of labour. Therefore, a land lord is not merely a rent collecting agent (economic role), but the head of an inherited social system (caste and its variants). This duality of economic and social relations needs to be considered whilst analyzing political and social questions in the contexts of such societies.

Barring a few typographical errors, the book is an important contribution to critical historical thinking in India. The essays are thematically presented with a brief introduction. Although the articles are rooted in their historical circumstances, the analytical method and the questions that the author evoke remain relevant to this day. A timely revisit to the old questions!

Understanding the Age of Information

Neil Postman (1985), Amusing ourselves to death, Penguin books, New York, pp.184

Neil Postman’s classic manifesto on the influence of television on popular culture, written in the 1980s, speaks directly to our world today that is inundated with information. What is fascinating about this work is the uncanny precision with which the author imagines the future standing on the cusp of the internet revolution. The basic premise of his argument is that there are two alternatives possible for the us, as the next waves of technology wash us over- Orwellian dystopia or Huxleyan trivial future.

In his most famous book 1984, George Orwell vividly anticipated a new captive culture that was subjected to constant surveillance and control, resulting in a world imprisoned in externally-manifested oppression. On the other hand, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World imagined a new generation with an infinite appetite for distraction which was eventually reduced to passivity and egoism. As we reflect on the seven waves of digital revolution that has given us machine learning and internet-of-things (where even ordinary objects are imbued with a semblance of ‘intelligence’), we seem to be increasingly staring at a Huxleyan universe.

The great transformation

The book is divided into two parts. In the first section, Postman discusses the characteristics of the enormous revolution through which we are living. In the second part, the author examines various spheres of life that has metamorphosed, thanks to new media. Using an American centric vantage point, Postman analyzes the totalitarian manner in which television progressively transformed the way we understand and interpret information. The first two chapters give a sketch of how the new medium created a new metaphor (way of using language) and epistemology (way of knowing). In a trenchant comparison, he contrasts what visual medium has creatively destroyed that the typographic world of the printing press had given us earlier. His analysis prods us to think about how the internet has disrupted a world that was governed by visual media.

To begin with, the speed, quantity and quality of information has changed and so has the need for relevance, positionality and coherence. It seems that standard setting by experts and counsel from experience is increasingly irrelevant as the entire world is reduced to millions of data points and machines can decipher patterns that we cannot. Furthermore, democratization of the digital universe has ensured that we are not required to have eligibility of entry or membership or even purpose when we inhabit the internet world. The need for well-thought out exposition seems to be over and with it an appetite for public discourse. Consequently, appreciation of silence, ability for reasoned arguments and adherence to self-imposed restraint are becoming rare qualities. The fragmentation of information with no attention to sequencing, meaning, value and scale leads to the generation of an immense amount of information packs that momentarily invade our lives incoherently and chaotically. As a result, we become the product and consumers of the information age.

There are several ways to get introduced to the theme of how digital technology affects various facets of our life. It is important and urgent that we educate ourselves through the well-thought of arguments of others who know more than we do and have patiently examined these questions vigorously. Jaron Lanier’s (the father of virtual technology) You are not a Gadget is an excellent introduction to the philosophy of what it means to be ‘encapsulated’. Oxford Professor Victor Mayor-Schönberger’s (co-authored with Kenneth Cukier) Big Data gives a comprehensive description of the specific challenges and actionable points that we can take as we step into new realities. The books and articles of Eric Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee present a mainstream perspective that excitedly anticipates the future in a digitally immersed world. Garry Kasparov’s part-memoir Deep Thinking evaluates how humans can thrive in an age of artificial intelligence. But a great primer is still Postman’s manifesto that helps us to understand when technology becomes a medium of culture and how it transforms our minds. In a style that is crisp with arguments that are cogent, Postman appeals to our reason and rationality and delivers his fare with wit and wisdom. An absolutely delightful and important book for our times!

Statistical Revolution in the 20th Century

David Salsburg (2001), The Lady Tasting Tea. Henry Holt Paperbacks, New York, pp. 340

This book is a tour de force of the statistical revolution in the twentieth century that transformed science from a deterministic branch of inquiry into something more probabilistic as we know it today. In the introductory chapter, Salsburg paints a picture of nineteenth century science that introduced a ‘clock-work’ universe in which a small number of mathematical laws were used to describe reality and predict future events using a set of formulas and their associated measurements. This ‘god-less universe’ was a fundamental disruption from the earlier conceptions of creationism and shook popular culture into understanding and accepting its temperament. Gradually, into this new universe, ‘error functions’ were introduced when reality deviated from the predicted models or when human mistakes crept in. The addition of error function and probabilistic thinking about the world around us was the major contribution of ‘statistical’ thinking in science that later led to major developments including the development of computers on the one hand, and public policy tools such as census on the other.

Lives and Works of Statisticians

This book tells the story of how statistics transformed the philosophical foundations of science in the last century, through the lives and works of major statisticians. On the criterion of selecting the scholars described in the book, Salsburg confesses that he chose major contributors of mathematical statistics who are accessible non-mathematically to a lay audience. In 29 chapters, the author has given a bird’s-eye view of pioneers such as Galton, Pearson, Fisher, Gosset and Neyman, sympathetic portrayal of extraordinary lives of geniuses and polymaths in the likes of Kolmogorov and Tukey and unearthed the stories of quiet but significant contributions of Samuel Wilks, Isidore Good and FN David. An entire chapter deals with the contribution of women statisticians in addition to their stewardship that comes through many chapters throughout the book.

The book builds up anticipation through its riveting narrative of the most well-known figures in history. We begin in Galton’s laboratory and see him at work in regression and skew distribution followed by Karl Pearson as he expands and sets up great institutions such as Biometrika and an entire school of philosophical thought. Then, enter Gosset and his ‘student’s T-test’ till the imitable Fisher comes in to break old orthodoxies and liberate many strands of inquiry. The gentle giant Neyman and the extra-ordinary foresight of Kolmogorov, especially his philosophical questions, are dealt with sensitivity and understanding. One thing I found missing was a last chapter that could have shown the way ahead in terms of exciting new work done by young scholars and the directions that the discipline in taking in the 21^st century.

The book is at once a collection of brief biographical sketches of statisticians, broad-brush history of institutions and a short reference guide to important academic work in modern statistics. Written with sympathy and erudition, Salsburg’s work is a warm introduction to both the science-history buff as well as to anyone about to embark on a serious academic journey in statistics.

Adieu, Philip Roth

Philip Milton Roth wrote an impressively long list of savagely funny novels and stories during his lifetime including the stunning American Trilogy written in his sixties. He was awarded a number of prestigious literary awards including National Book Award and The Presidential medal for the Humanities during his lifetime. When he died on 22 May, we lost a voice that relentlessly pilloried our absurdities and exposed our fragility. What does Philip Roth mean in a world where Philip Roth does not physically exist anymore?

Guilt as Comedy

Roth followed in the tradition of engaging with guilt-ridden characters after the tradition of Shakespeare’s Othello, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Dostoevsky’s Rodion Raskolnikov, Flaubert’s Emma Bovary and Kafka’s Josef K. But he treated guilt as a comical idea by means of characters who were cut off from their moorings and lived beyond their moral means. His outlandish protagonists were not paradigms of conflicting selves but individuals whose spiritual and sensual ambitions were so inextricably interlinked that they had to find a personalized way of salvation. Their problem was not that they were fragmented and deluded, but that they were whole and undeluded. This often brought them into tension with moral authority and social restraints from the outside. A Rothsian character had moral sovereignty, personal commandments, ethical convictions, personal inhibitions and fear. Her comic recklessness to rebel against taboos brought her pain, rage and a sense of loss and nostalgia as much as honoring social expectations did. Alex in Portnoy’s Complaint and Lucy in When She was Good, rebelling against their parents find their rage inadequate to salvage their pain.

Guilt as comedy was the central preoccupation of Roth as he attempted to portray the vicissitudes of being American and being Jewish. On writing American novels, he described that to understand, describe and make credible the American reality of the twentieth century was a formidable challenge to any writer. He remarked that the American reality ‘stupefies, sickens, infuriates and then embarrasses’ the quintessential American writer because actuality outdoes imagination and life emerges as a substitute for fiction. We experience the outlandishness of this reality in his political satires especially The Great American Novel and Our Gang. The creation of counter history and counter mythology of a nation begins with inane acts of separating the power-holder from power. Roth savagely attacked this discrepancy between official piety and unpleasant truths.

When he started out describing Jewish characters in stories such as Epstein, he was initially described as a self-hating Jew. Quite characteristically, he reacted with ‘to ask a satirist to be in good taste is like asking a love poet to be less personal’. Roth explained that he was trying to not depict a stereotype of the Jew but point out when a Jew acted like the stereotype. He was responding to the Jewish predicament of the need to act out Jewishness in highly differentiated ways which was traumatic and inescapable after having gone through specific kinds of historical persecution and humiliation. His unique position as a Jewish man gave him the freedom to refuse ennobling even the persecuted, with the explanation that the lack of will and grace is found in all of us.

The Final Literary Act

It was this continuing distrust of ‘positions of authority’ including his own that motivated him to write the way he did. He described his writing as a literary act not a political one and his retribution was parodic justice. On this issue, he followed the dictum of the Russian writer Andrei Sinyavsky, whose last statement in his trial by an authoritarian regime was that ‘the most rudimentary thing about literature…is that words are not deeds’.

Roth never wrote for an audience. His deep mistrust of external authority of any kind and validated positions meant that he would not have cared about his legacy as a writer. But he would have cared about being read. It would have mattered to him if his books began conversations between partially realized narratives that we all are, drawing energy from one another. In that sense he has left us a world to continue those conversations. Roth once spoke about the legacy of the writers he admired thus, ‘the trick apparently is to turn yourself from a proper noun to an adjective and the best way to accomplish this is to die’. Now that he is gone, his final literary act has been to gift us this adjective- enter the Rothsian!

A Study in Statistics

Stephen Jay Gould (1996). The Mismeasure of Man. Penguin London, pp. 446

‘Art is limitation. The essence of every picture is the frame’.

G.K. Chesterton

Stephen Gould is a rare species in the literary world- a scientist with a flair for essay-writing! Through his monthly column in the Natural History magazine, Gould crossed disciplinary boundaries from evolutionary theory to science history and used diverse tools such as statistics and common sense to drive home his arguments. To a student of biology, he is known for his punctuated equilibrium theory among other things and to the philosopher, for his argument that science and religion were two distinct domains with non-overlapping authorities. It is to the non-specialist, that Gould was at his delightful best, exposing the dangers of applying faulty logic and ‘evidence’ from science to justify social projects of domination and discrimination.

Ranking Intelligence

In this book, Gould examines one specific form of quantifying claim about ranking human beings as an illustration of the larger malady. He discusses the belief that intelligence can be meaningfully abstracted as a single number and graded in a linear scale to denote the intrinsic and unalterable worth of a person. He examines this question from three vantage points- that of the philosophical error of the assumption, social impact of its implementation and the epistemological underpinning of ‘nature versus nurture’ that it evokes.

Characteristic to his method, he goes about dismantling this argument by systematically tracing its historical antecedents. He revisits each scholar as he sets about his experiments and draws his inferences, walking with them through their intellectual journey and exposing where the fault-lines of their logic lay.  He takes us back to the time of feverishly measuring cranium and bodies of corpses in the hope of measuring intelligence and later, tinkering with genes and environment with the faith that the truth about our abilities can be abstracted and distilled in a meaningful way. He demonstrates how even the best intended scholars can be blinded to their own fallacies in methods and measurement and how our implicit beliefs often colour our inferences. By doing this exercise with exacting rigour and immense patience, he shows us how, women, people of colour and people with differential abilities come out on their own, liberated from the burden of historical accusations of intellectual inferiority that was unfair, untruthful and dangerous.

This book is a study in history as much as it is in statistics. The parts of the book where Gould marshals evidence from research methodology (especially on factor analysis) is so lucid that I cannot but recommend it to students beginning their research work using statistical methods. I believe that the greatest contribution of the book is the perspective it gives us regarding what scientific enquiry is all about. Like the message in Chesterton’s quote in the beginning of this essay, science like art, is limited by its frame of reference. It is in acknowledging the limits of enquiry that we can hope to be truthful about our inference.

The Wandering Poet of Edo

Lucien Stryk (Translation) (1985), On Love and Barley: Haiku of Basho, London: Penguin Books, pp.92

‘Learn about a pine tree from a pine tree, and about a bamboo stalk from a bamboo stalk.’

                                                      -Basho

This is the kind of poetry book that feels like treasure. It has verses in translation that is accessible without draining away too much across languages, a form of poetry that is short and unique, beautiful Taiga paintings as you move from one set of verses to another and an excellent introductory essay and reader-friendly notes at the end. Even though you are new to this form, you will not be lost here except in the Haiku themselves.

Philosophy of Haiku

Haiku, in its traditional seventeen syllable form, has two parts. The first part is often the depiction of a condition as found in nature and the second part is a feeling of sudden perception. These two parts are divided abruptly by a cutting-phrase in Japanese called kireji, rendered in the English translation as an emphatic punctuation like the hyphen. The philosophy behind Haiku was that a moment that was taken from a context, devoid of antecedence (past time, memory) or consequences (future time or anticipation) is capable of attaining transcendental unity. Haiku significantly differed from other forms of poetry by demanding active audience participation for the completion of its rendition. Every Haiku begins in the poet’s mind and ends in the reader’s.

Basho’s legacy

Matsuo Kinsake was the greatest Japanese Haiku poet of the Tokugawa period of the seventeenth century Japan. He wrote under the name Basho, in honour of the broad-leaved banana tree (originally called Basho in Japanese) that one of his disciples gifted him. He revolutionalized traditional Haiku that was originally practiced by scholarly poets, freeing it from the rigid orthodoxy of rules. He infused lightness (karumi), solitude (sabi) and sparseness (wabi) of Zen in his signature Shofu-style Haiku. In his lifetime, he is thought to have written at least 1000 Haikus, often tucked away in his much-loved travel sketches written in haibun style (haiku followed by prose). The central concern in his poetry is the appreciation and elevation of the mundane and the commonplace.

To capture Basho’s haiku in other languages is a daunting task and Lucien Stryk has done an amazing job rendering it in English. Some of his poems are poignant and some self-deprecatingly funny, but all of them leave you with lingering poignancy. Most of his poetry dwells on the movement of time, the cycle of seasons and the evolution of mind with the natural flow of life. His love for Edo (modern Tokyo), mountain Fuji, cherry blossoms and the landscape of Japan is equally matched by his friendship with fellow poets and philosophers and love for enigmatic women. He loves, lives, celebrates, complains and grieves, seventeen syllables at a time.

Reading this volume is having the privilege to roam around freely with him. Though separated in time and place, across language and form, Basho talks to you and thinks with you. He belongs to all of us and to all time and ages. In his own words,

House of fancy-

Dozing there, it

Was all mine.

And now, it is all ours too!