Mahabharata Vol. 3, by Bibek Debroy - review

Mahabharata, Vol. 3, translated by Bibek Debroy
"A Time for Learning and Preparing"
(Amazon, Penguin Books, Infibeam, India Plaza, Flipkart)
(My review on Amazon )


This volume covers and completes the Aranyaka Parva, which began in Vol 2, and is a time of learning for the Pandavas. While Arjuna treks to heaven to obtain knowledge of weapons and dance from Indra, Yudhishtra is educated on dharma by a host of learned men, prime among them being sage Markandeya. This is also the volume with several famous tales that have been part of Hindu culture for millennia.

From the Aranyaka Parva, the third parva in the eighteen-parva classification, this volume contains chapters 33 through 44, chapter 33 being the "Tirtha Yatra" parva, and chapter 44 being the "Araneya" parva within the 100-parva classification. The very first parva, "Tirtha Yatra" is a massive adhyaya, clocking in at 2,422 shlokas. It is by far the longest parva in the epic so far. However, there seems to be some anomaly when adding up the shlokas in the Teertha Parva. The table in the Introduction states the Tirtha Parva as having 2422 shlokas, while page 1, where the Tirtha Parva starts, states that it has 2294 shlokas.

Arjuna has gone to the heavens in search of divine weapons that the Pandavas know they will need to get their kingdom back. The remaining Pandavas are missing Arjuna terribly. The sage Narada comes visiting, and Yudhishtra asks him to expound on the merits "obtained by someone who circles the earth and visits all the tirthas". The sage asks the Pandavas to listen in turn to what rishi Pulastya had told Bhishma in response to the same question. Thus begins Tirtha Parva. While we have been told in some detail the importance of Kurukshetra in Vol 1, in the Adi Parva, this parva contains more details on the holiness of Kurukshetra as a tirtha. "Even if one only wishes to go to Kurukshetra in one's mind, all one's sins are destroyed and one goes to to Brahma's world." and later "But in all the three worlds, Kurukshetra is special. Even the dust carried away by the winds in Kurukshetra takes the performer of evil acts to the supreme objective. ... Those who live in Kurukshetra live in heaven, "I will go to Kurukshetra, I will live in Kurukshetra," He who utters this single sentence is cleansed of all sins."

The stories of Agastya, Lopamudra Ilvala and Vatapi, Indra and Vritra (which is expounded upon in greater detail in Vol. 4), the Vindhyas are also to be found in this single tirtha. The story of Ganga, and how the ashes of the sons of King Sagara were immersed in the Ganga is then recounted starting with adhyaya 104 (of the Aranyaka Parva). We then get to hear about sage Rishabha, sage Kashyap's son Rishyashringa, who was born as the son of a deer, sage Jamadagni, his wife Renuka, and their fifth son Parshurama. The story of Sage Chyavana and Sukanya, which is also available as an Amar Chitra Katha, is recounted in chapter 122 and 123. The story of King Somaka and his lone son Jantu is heart-rending in some ways. A line from that adhyaya (128) is worth repeating here:

Dharma replied, 'O King!No one ever obtains the fruits of someone else's action.'

Chapter 130 and 131 retell the story of King Shibi, who was confronted by a familiar dilemma of dharma whereby protecting the dove would have meant depriving the hawk. (Read the Amar Chitra Katha, "Indra and Shibi", for a nice illustrated version of the story). Chapters 132 onwards the story of Ashtavakra is recited. Chapter 134 contains the famous debate between Ashtavakra and Bandi. You could read that adhyaya again and again, such is the cascading crescendo of the debate between the learned sage and the twelve-year old Ashtavakra.

There is a considerable amount of space devoted to Bhima's travels towards the Gandhamadana mountains and his meeting with his half-brother, Hanuman. It is only in chapter 161 that we see Arjuna return after completing his stay in the heavens.

Ajgara Parva is somewhat similar to Araneya parva. In both, it is Yudhishtra's knowledge of dharma that saves his brothers. One can also interpret these parvas in different manner. While it was Yudhishtra's love of gambling that saw him lose his kingdom, his brothers, and his wife, in gambling to Shakuni, it is recently acquired knowledge from the sages in the forest that sees him redeeming himself and saving his brothers.
While it is Bhima in the Ajgara Parva, it is all his four brothers that Yudhishtra saves in the Araneya Parva.

From the Ajgara Parva, there are a few lines that bear repeating, if only to highlight what Yudhishtra has to say about who is learned and who is not; in other words, who is a brahman and who is not.
Yudhishtra replied, "If these traits, not even found in a brahmana, are seen in a shudra, he is not a shudra. A brahmana in whom a brahmana's traits are not found, is a shudra." In other words, it is conduct that determines your caste, so to say. Putting it in even simpler words, one is noble or not based on actions. Karma is prime; birth is not. "All men are equal in speech ... birth, and death."
Immediately afterwards, in Chapter 178, we see a profound exchange between Nahusha and Yudhishtra on dharma. Yudhishtra asks,

"O serpent! Between generosity and truthfulness, which is seen to be superior? Between non-violence and good conduct, which is superior and which is inferior"
'The serpent replied, "The superiority or inferiority of generosity versus truthfulness or non-violence vis-a-vis good conduct is determined by whether the effects of these deeds are more or less important."

This emphasis on karma, deeds, is a recurring theme in the epic.This parva, Ajgara Parva, is profound in itself and bears resemblance to some of the principal Upanishads themselves.

There is yet another fascinating episode, where the sage Markandeya, tells the Pandavas the story of the sage Koushika, who, on being berated by the wife of a householder as not being conversant with the true meaning of dharma, left for the city of Mithila, where a hunter, who bought and sold meat, enlightens the sage on dharma. Yet another reminder of how it is our deeds that define who we are, and not where we are or how we were born. There is an passage where the hunter tries to disabuse sage Koushika of the notions of ahimsa (violence) by saying:

"Agriculture is known to be a virtuous occupation. But it has been said that there is great violence in this. Ploughing kills many beings that lie inside the ground and many other hundreds of beings. What is your view on this? ... Man hunts, kills and eats animals. They also cut trees and herbs. O brahmana! There are many living beings in trees and fruit. There are many in water too. What is your view on this? O brahmana! Everything is full of life and living beings. Fish eat fish, What is your view on this? O supreme among brahmanas! Beings live on other beings. O supreme among brahmanas! Beings live on other beings. ... But in this world, who does not injure living beings?"

This volume ends, as does the Aranyaka Parva, with chapter 299, and the Pandavas ready to enter the thirteenth year of exile incognito.

Bibek Debroy, the translator, is an economist with a difference. How so? Well, let's just say different. Consider this. In the early 1980s, while at the Presidency College in Kolkata, the author wrote a paper where he did a "statistical test on the frequency with which the five Pandavas used various weapons in the Kurukshetra war." Yes. Different. While his interest in the Mahabharata "remained, I got sidetracked into translating. Through the 1990s, there were abdridged translations of the Maha Puranas, the Vedas and the eleven major Upanishads."

The author has followed the Critical Edition from the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, in Pune, for his translation. The entire series is expected to run into ten volumes, and so far, at the time of my writing this review of the third volume, four volumes have been released, with each volume appearing roughly every six months, the most recent one, Vol. 4, published in Nov. 2011.

As far as purchasing these volumes are concerned, you can get these books from Amazon in the US. In India there is a plethora of choices. Several brick-and-mortar stores sell them, including Crosswords and Landmark. For online shopping, while Flipkart continues to offer amazing service and blazingly fast deliveries (a less than 24-hour turnaround time from order to delivery is not uncommon!), their discounts on books have fallen steeply over the past several months. They are selling this book for Rs 440, a healthy 20% discount off the list price of Rs 550 (I re-checked and this is now whittled down to a 15% discount, with a net selling price of Rs 468). However, check out other sites like Infibeam, that is selling the book for Rs 413 (25% off), and IndiaPlaza, which is selling the book at a whopping 40% discount, for Rs 330 - truly a bargain.

• https://twitter.com/#!/bibekdebroy
• Bibek Debroy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
• Penguin Books India page for Bibek Debroy

Mahabharata, Vol. 1
Amazon, Flipkart, Infibeam, IndiaPlaza
My blog post
My review on Amazon.com



Mahabharata, Vol. 2
Amazon, India Plaza, Flipkart
My blog post
My review on Amazon.com



Mahabharata, Vol. 4
Amazon, Penguin Books, India Plaza, Flipkart



 

© 2012, Abhinav Agarwal. All rights reserved.

Mahabharata Vol. 2, by Bibek Debroy - my review

Mahabharata Volume 2 (The complete, unabridged Mahabharata) - Translated by Bibek Debroy

(Amazon.com, Flipkart, Infibeam, IndiaPlaza)
(My blog post of the first volume, my review on Amazon)
This is the second volume of the author's unabridged translation of the Mahabharata, published in April 2011. It starts off from where the first volume had ended, naturally so, and completes the "Adi Parva", contains the entire "Sabha Parva", and contains about a quarter of the third parva, "Aranyaka". As per the 100-parva classification of the Mahabharata, this contains Parvas 16-32 ("Arjuna-vanavasa" to "Indralokabhigamana" parvas). Interestingly enough, the book starts off with Arjuna having to leave Indraprastha and ends with Arjuna again leaving the Pandavas for the heavens in search of divine weapons from his divine father, Indra.

In this volume, there are several stories-within-stories, and also what I would call a mini-Arthashastra. When the sage Narada arrives at Indraprastha, he is worried about a potential rift between the Pandavas arising as a result of Droupadi, their wife. Therefore, he recounts the story of Sunda and Upasunda and how they, "incapable of being killed by anyone else, except each other", did in fact kill themselves over Tilottama, a celestial beauty created by Vishwakarma. What is interesting is that the daityas Sunda and Upasunda ask for the boon of immortality from Brahma. However, Brahma, expectedly, refuses this boon, replying:

"Since you have performed these austerities with an objective in mind, the boon of immortality cannot be granted to you." [Ch 201, Adi Parva, Arjuna-Vanavasa Parva]

Is there a hint there, that the boon of immortality comes to only those who actually do not need it, or do not ask for it, and do not desire it?

The "Harana Harika Parva" sees Droupadi mouth these famous words in response to Arjuna's bringing home a second wife, Subhadra, "A second load always loosens the first tie, however strong."

The "Khandava Daha Parva" is where Arjuna and Krishna burn the Khandava forest in response to a request from the Sun-god Surya, who approaches them in the form of a brahmana. Arjuna is given the Gandiva, and Lord Krishna the chakra and a mace, the "Koumadaki". Ch 217 describes the terrible, terrible scene of the great fire. The description is fairly gruesome at times. Sample this: "As Khandava blazed, thousands of beings leapt in the ten directions, uttering frightened yells. Some were burnt in one spot. Some were scorched. The eyes burst out for some. Some withered away. Some lost their minds and scattered. Some clung to their sons, others to their fathers and mothers. Out of affection, they were unable to let go and perished. Others rose up in the thousands, their forms distorted....". In the end, Takshaka's son Ashvasena, the asura architect Maya, and the four Sharngakas were the only six beings that were spared in that great fire.

Maya then returns the favor to Arjuna by offering to and designing and building the grandest palace of all for the Pandavas, the Maya Sabha. The hall where the envy of Duryodhana would be fuelled beyond tolerance, and would start in motion the steps that would lead to the fateful 18 days on the battlefield of Kurukshetra more than thirteen years later. In the Sabha Parva, there is an eminently illuminating and the first of several philosophical mini-treatises that are to be found in the Mahabharata, the greatest of them all of course being the "Bhagvad Gita".  This one however is more political and administrative in nature, where Sage Narada visits the Pandavas at Indraprastha and questions Yudhishtra. The Sabha Parva also tells us how the asura architect Maya brought Bhima a club (gada) and Arjuna his Devdutt conch. Sage Narada advises Yudhishtra to hold the Rajsuya Yagya, which Yudhishtra, "after reflecting a great deal, made up his mind to perform...". However, the king wanted honest advice, so he sends a message for Krishna to Dwarka. Krishna arrives at Indraprastha. Yudhishtra then asks him for advice.

"Out of friendship, some do not notice faults. Out of desire for riches, some say that which is pleasant to hear. some consider that to be the best course of action which brings them self-gain. it is often that people's advice is like this. You alone are above all motives, beyond desire and anger." [Ch 12, Mantra Parva]

It is then that Krishna recites the story of Jarasandha's birth and why he is the biggest obstacle to the Rajsuya Yagya.

The next several adhyayas (chapters) are decidedly pivotal in the epic. The Arghabhiharana Parva is where the first offering has to be made, and upon Bhishma's advice, Sahadeva offered the first arghya to Krishna. And after that, in a manner of speaking, all hell breaks loose. Shishupala begins by asking certain pointed and valid questions of the Pandavas in their choice of Krishna as the receiver of the first arghya. Valid if you ignore Lord Krishna's divinity, which Shishupala obviously does. Yudhishtra pacifies Shishupala, ending his entreaties with this statement, "If Shishupala considers that this homage was undeserving, let him act as he sees fit, for this undeserving honour." Things escalate rapidly after that, with Shishupala instigating the other kings to disrupt the sacrifice. The "Shishupala Vadha Parva", as the name suggests, sees Krishna behead Shishupala. But not before Shishupala has had his fill of hurling insults at Bhishma and Krishna. The back-and-forth between Shishupala, Bhishma, and Krishna is worth reading in its entirety, and repeatedly, such is the rapidly escalating tension that the exchange conveys. With the slaying however, the sacrifice comes to a somewhat somber and inauspicious end, and all the kings and guests depart. That is, with the exception of Duryodhana and Shakuni. And we all know what happens next. Except that it is not Droupadi who insults Duryodhana, but the servants and the others who laugh out loud when Duryodhana falls into the water, not Droupadi. However, Duryodhana does recount has having seen Droupadi having laughed at him, but along with all the others who also did. Did Duryodhana imagine that Droupadi had also joined in the laughter? Because the original verses that recount the incident where Duryodhana falls into the water do not mention Droupadi by name. Why is it that Droupadi was singled out and solely implicated in this royal and grievous insult later on I don't know. Whatever the case, it is the combination of this insult and seeing the riches of the Pandavas at Indraprastha that drives Duryodhana to extreme distress.

"This ordinary prosperity does not please me. I am miserable on seeing the blazing prosperity of Kunti's son."

Duryodhana is very clear as to who his enemies are, and he argues with Dhritarashtra thus:

"... because he knew that enmity towards a foe is eternal. Like a snake swallows a rat, the earth swallows up two - the king who does not strive and the brahmana who does not live at home. O lord of the earth! No one is by nature another man's enemy. The enemy is that whose pursuits are the same as one's own, and not anyone else." [Ch 51, Sabha Parva, Dyuta Parva]

Dhritarashtra gives in to his son's demands, and Vidura carries the invitation, much to Bhishma's grief. The gambling starts. Seventeen times Yudhishtra and Shakuni gamble. Seventeen times does the king lose. The seventeenth roll of the dice where Dharmaraja loses Droupadi.

The Sabha Parva ends with the Pandavas having lost the second round of gambling, where a single stake, exile for thirteen years, sees Yudhishtra losing, once again, to Shakuni. The next parva in the book, as per the eighteen parva classification, is the Aranyaka Parva. It is not completed in this book, and goes on for much of the third volume also.

Ch 29, Kairata Parva (Parva 31 in the 100 parva classification), part of the Aranyaka Parva (of the 18-parva classification), has this exchange between Droupadi and Yudhishtra, where she recounts an ancient story of a conversation between Prahalad and Bali on the subject of forgiveness. When Bali asks Prahalad, his grandfather, whether "forgiveness leads to welfare, or is it better to seek revenge?", Prahalad expounds on the merits and demerits of both. Excerpts:

"Revenge is not always superior. Nor is forgiveness always superior. Learn the nature of both, so that there is no scope for doubt.
...
A man who always forgives suffers from many faults. His servants treat him with contempt and others are also disrespectful. ... Therefore, the learned say that perpetual forgiveness should be avoided. ... Those with limited intelligence try to take his riches away from him. ... To be ignored in this world is worse than death.
...
Now listen to the faults associated with those who never forgive.If in the wrong place, or even in the right one, a person is afflicted with passion and anger and metes out various punishments on the strength of his energy, he will be clouded because of his energy and will face conflicts with his allies. ... If he equally uses his force on benefactors and those who wish him ill, such a man is shunned in the world, like a snake inside a house.
...
Listen, I will now tell you in details about the time when one should be forgiving.
...
If a former benefactor commits a crime that is not too great, in view of the earlier favour, this transgression should be pardoned. Those who commit an offence out of stupidity and seek pardon should be forgiven, because learning is not easily available everywhere to men. Even if the offence is slight, an offender who commits a crime with full knowledge, but claims he did not know, should be punished, because this is crookedness. The first offence should be forgiven for all beings. But when they commit the second one, however slight, it should be punished." [Ch 29, Kairata Parva (Parva 31 in the 100 parva classification), part of the Aranyaka Parva (Parva 3 in the 18-parva classification)]

The entire series is expected to run into ten volumes, and so far, at the time of writing this review, four volumes have been released, with each volume appearing roughly every six months, the most recent one, Vol.4, published in Nov. 2011. The fifth one, then, can be expected in April 2012. At this pace, the tenth, and last, volume should be published in Nov 2014.


The author has followed the Critical Edition from the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, in Pune, for his translation. There have been only five unabridged translations of the Mahabharata to-date, three of them by Indians (KM Ganguli, PC Roy, and MN Dutt), and a fourth work, recently completed, from the Writers Workshop (see my paragraph below), and two that have originated in the United States (one from the University of Chicago, and the other from the Clay Institute - both translations are as yet unfinished). This work is therefore, the sixth such translation.


There are several episodes that have been excised from the critical edition, and are therefore missing from this translation also: these are some that I am aware of:
. Akshay-patra gifted to Droupadi:
. Arjuna worships Shiva:
. Urvashi curses Arjuna:

In some ways, these popular episodes add to the grand epic, and it is not clear to me why they were removed from the Critical Edition. This makes me wonder if I should not add to my wish-list the P. Lal transcreation published by the Writers Workshop; this is now complete and available in 18 volumes, each corresponding to a parva of the epic. They total more than 11,000 pages, and cost close to 13,000 rupees. The longest book is Volume 3, corresponding to the "Vana Parva", is 1572 pages long, and costs Rs 2000, while the shortest is the "Mahaprasthanika Parva", Volume 17, at 36 pages. According to Wikipedia, this transcreation "...is a non-rhyming verse-by-verse rendering, and is the only edition in any language to include all slokas in all recensions of the work (not just those in the Critical Edition)". I have not read reviews of this work, but the fact that it includes all shlokas (verses) alone makes it worth buying/reading for the serious Mahabharata reader.

• Mahabharata, Vol. 1, translated by Bibek Debroy (Amazon, India Plaza, Flipkart)
• Mahabharata, Vol. 3, translated by Bibek Debroy (Penguin Books, Infibeam, India Plaza, Flipkart, Amazon)
• Mahabharata, Vol. 4, translated by Bibek Debroy (Penguin Books, India Plaza, Flipkart, Amazon)
• https://twitter.com/#!/bibekdebroy
• Bibek Debroy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
• Penguin Books India page for Bibek Debroy
• Clay Sanskrit Library
• Mahabharata Book Two: The Great Hall (Bk. 2), Clay Sanskrit Institute
• NYU Press - The Clay Sanskrit Library: Mahabharata
• The Mahabharata, Volume 1: Book 1: The Book of the Beginning, van Buitenen (University of Chicago Press)
• The Mahabharata, Volume 1 edited by JAB van Buitenen (Google Books)
• Writers Workshop (Wikipedia)

In India, Flipkart offers amazing service and blazingly fast deliveries (a less-than 24 hour turnaround time from order to delivery is not uncommon!). However, they are selling the book for Rs 508, which is a miserly 8% discount off the list price of Rs 550. You may also want to check out other sites like Infibeam and IndiaPlaza, which is selling the book at a whopping 40% discount, for Rs 330 - truly a bargain.

© 2012, Abhinav Agarwal. All rights reserved.

The Mahabharata, 1: The Book of the Beginning

The Mahabharata, Volume 1: Book 1: The Book of the Beginning, Translated and Edited by J. A. B.van Buitenen (Amazon, Google Books, University of Chicago Press, Flipkart, my review on Amazon.com)

Academically laudable but soulless, rancorous translation of an epic

It is perhaps, and deservedly so, a commendable work of scholarly output. The mammoth exercise in translation started more than thirty years ago, and as of my writing this review, still continues. The last translation published was in 2003, of the first part of the "Shanti Parva". Not only have the translators translated the Critical Edition ("the present translation is naturally based on this critical edition") of the Mahabharata into English, but they have also reconciled, in the appendix, the Bombay (now called Mumbai) and Pune Critical Editions. This book, titled "The Book of the Beginning" is the full translation of the first parva of the Mahabharata, the "Adi Parva". In addition to the reconciliation of the Bombay and Poona editions, it also contains thirty-five pages of copious notes at the end, that are also illuminating. Like the example of Shakuntala's meeting with King Duhsanta (also spelled as Dushyanta or Dushanta), where they refer to Kalidasa's Sanskrit play "Abhijnana Sakuntala" as judged by "many to be the finest example of the Sanskrit play." As I also wrote in my review (blog post link), Shakuntala is a bold and fearless lady. "Nothing in the play of Kalidasa compares with with the tongue-lashing that Shakuntala gives Duhsanta in this story, and it is a relief when a divine voice interferes to set matters right." [pg 449].

Despite the obviously scholarly nature of the work, and the copious research that has gone into this first volume, I was also left with somewhat of a bitter aftertaste, and which had nothing to do with the story itself.

The tone of the translation, and particularly the Introduction, is petty at times, and singularly devoid of indications that the translators have grasped the soul of the epic. The translation is strewn with some rather graceless choices in translation and poor choices of words. I will illustrate with a handful of examples:

Page xxiii (Introduction): "The wise Bhisma, ... interminably exponds on the varieties of dharma in what must be the longest deathbed sermon of record." Yes, very droll. Wink wink. We are appropriately amused.

Page xxiii (Introduction): on the topic of the the Mahabharata revered as being all-encompassing of the range of human emotions and experiences found in this world, the translators are ready with a repartee for that too. "Almost any text of "Hindu" inspiration could be included in this expanding library, so that in the end the custodians could rightly boast that "whatever is found here may be found somewhere else, but what is not found here is found nowhere.". See, there is nothing great or profound in the epic; it's just the decidedly janitorial effort over three thousand years of some egomaniacal brahmins to add in the text any and sundry inclusions. Yes, we are smart; we can see through these pretensions of the epic and its followers.

Page 2 (Introduction): "... the rambling narrative..."


Page 6 (Introduction): when describing the birth of the Kuru princes, the sentence goes like "... and begets the blind Dhrtarastra, the ... Prince Pandu whose name means "pallid", and the bastard Vidura." That is a curious epithet to apply to only one of the three songs of Vysa.

Detect a trend? We are not even in the actual translation, and the translators have exercised their eminent scholarship to the fullest, as much as they can without inviting obvious aspersions on their motivations and agenda, hidden or otherwise.

Page 44 (Pausya Parva): "The bitch of the Gods, Sarama...", repeated later on the same page, and elsewhere also referred to as "... the divine bitch...". Whereas calling her "dog of the Gods" would have been equally sufficient, something that Bibek Debroy's Mahabharata chooses. The choice of the word and the construction of the phrase seems deliberate at best, and in rather poor taste in any event.

It seems to me, the reader, that whenever a choice presented itself to the translators of this monumental epic, one that required grace and  appreciation, and the other an opportunity to be petty and geelfully contemptuous, they chose the latter. In some ways this is not surprising, given the antecedents of some of the Indologists who have worked on this series, but even when evaluated from an impesonal objective, the effectiveness of the translation at times is somewhat undermined by a subterranean flow of spleen that regularly bubbles to the fore.

Bibek Debroy's work (my blog post, Amazon, Flipkart, Infibeam, IndiaPlaza) is in my opinion more faithful to the spirit of the Mahabharata, even as it also stays true to the Critical Edition. And that, in the final reckoning, counts for a lot more than the somewhat soulless if possibly academically more complete work that is the (at least the first volume) from the University of Chicago Press. When Bibek Debroy completes his translation and all the ten planned volumes have been published, I hope it offers a creditable and better alternative for the modern reader wishing to read this ancient Indian epic in its entirety.

© 2012, Abhinav Agarwal. All rights reserved.

Sasan Gir National Park and Wildlife Sanctuary

The truly majestic Asiatic lion now lives in the wild in only one place in Asia; in the western Indian state of Gujarat, within the protected confines of the Gir Forest National Park and Wildlife Sanctuary (Gujarat Tourism page on Gir, Wikipedia page on Gir). Where at one point in time the Asiatic lion could be found even in Northern Africa, today there are less than 500 Asiatic lions left in the wild, all of them in the 1400 sq kms that forms the sanctuary, of which about 250 sq km is fully protected.

This is the entrance to the park boundary when approaching the park from the eastern side. Basically this is where you would enter the park if you came from the Union Territory of Diu.

Contrast thy name is India. A shining black Audi luxury car, followed by a tractor with a huge sugarcane(?) load.

View Larger Map

One way, convenient if a bit less than ideal, is to visit the Gir Interpretation Center at Devalia. This is approximately 12 kms from the Gir sanctuary, and within a double-gate entry fenced enclosure you can take an hour-long safari. There are perhaps half a dozen to a dozen lions kept in the park, so the chances of spotting a few lions are very high. Not the same as seeing one in the wild, but given that you have to be patient to spot a lion inside the national park itself, you may want to use this as a backup. There is also the gift shop at the Devalia Interpretation Center where you can pick up some nice gifts.
From the main highway that runs skirting the park, SH 26, you take a right on to SH100A, where the Devaliya Interpretation Center and safari is. This photo below is SH100A.

This is one of the mini-buses that ply to the safari and back. You have a choice of air-conditioned and non air-conditioned buses. In winter months, and perhaps even otherwise, you are better off with the non air-conditioned buses, because that will allow you to open the windows and get a better view of the safari and lions.

Yes, the lion is a majestic animal. Truly the king of the jungle. When you come face-to-face with it, or at least that's what you like to feel from inside the bus, there is a slight shiver that runs through you the first time you spot a lion. A sense of awe. The majestic beast walks gracefully, majestically; it is the king of the jungle, and it seems to know that.

As you can see, there is enough open space, and the underbrush seems to be constantly cleared and burned to minimize the risk of a fire during the dry months.

At the Gir Interpretation Center at Devalia there is a small shop where you can buy knick-knacks and gifts. You can buy nice t-shirts, paper-weights, caps, pens, keychains, calendars with stunning photographs from the sanctuary, coffee mugs, and more.

This is the entrance to the Gir National Park. There are forest vehicles that take you into the park. The first batch of vehicles is let into the park shortly after 6AM; I shot this photo at 6:30AM, some half an hour before sunrise. The best chances of spotting a lion inside  the park is in the early hours of the morning. As the day progresses, the lions retire into the deeper parts of the jungle, preferring to rest in the shade, waiting for nightfall to begin their hunting. As luck would have it, we spotted a lone lion less than a kilometer into the park. It crossed the road where our vehicles were, and sauntered into the jungle. Before I could realize it, the king of the jungle had vanished into the jungle.

Our vehicles stayed inside the park for more than two hours, driving at a leisurely pace. The biting cold did make it tougher to really enjoy the serenity of the jungle, but was no less memorable.

There is a tribe that lives inside the jungle; preferring to co-exist with the lions rather than the jungle outside. They are permitted by the government to live within the national park. These tribesmen are vegetarians.

The rising sun shines through the foliage and the trees.

 A spotted owl, I think, sitting atop a tree.

A white tree; I forget the name. Pity.

And a bird on one such white tree.

The sign of the king of the jungle is as much to be celebrated as the king itself. If the lion were given to hyperbole, it would probably say, "hum jahan khade ho jate hain, line wahin se shuru hoti hai." And true it would be, since where the pugmarks of a lion are spotted is where the spotters in the park go to and look for the lion from.

There is one, and only one negro tribe that lives in India. It is the "siddhi" tribe, and these people migrated to India from Africa several hundred years ago. Their cultural identity is preserved via categorizing them as a "scheduled tribe", thereby guaranteeing them certain rights and freedoms within the Indian constitution.

© 2012, Abhinav Agarwal. All rights reserved.

Mahabharata, Vol. 1, by Bibek Debroy - my review

The Mahabharata, Vol. 1, Translated by Bibek Debroy - my review
(Amazon, Flipkart, Infibeam, IndiaPlaza)
A strong start to a marathon...

An unabridged translation of the Mahabharata is a tall order. This book starts strongly; and this is going to be a marathon, with a total of 10 volumes planned.

Bibek Debroy, the translator, is an economist with a difference. How so? Well, consider this. In the early 1980s, while at the Presidency College in Kolkata, the author wrote a paper where he did a "statistical test on the frequency with which the five Pandavas used various weapons in the Kurukshetra war." Yes. Different. While his interest in the Mahabharata "remained, I got sidetracked into translating. Through the 1990s, there were abdridged translations of the Maha Puranas, the Vedas and the eleven major Upanishads."

This then is the first volume of the author's unabridged translation of the Mahabharata. The entire series is expected to run into ten volumes, and so far, at the time of my writing this review, four volumes have been released, with each volume appearing roughly every six months, the most recent one, Vol. 4, published in Nov. 2011. The fifth one, then, can be expected in April 2012. At this pace, the tenth, and last, volume should be published in Nov 2014.

The author has followed the Critical Edition from the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, in Pune, for his translation. There have been only five unabridged translations of the Mahabharata to-date, three of them by Indians, and two that have originated in the United States (one from the University of Chicago, and the other from the Clay Institute - both translations are as yet unfinished). This work is therefore, the sixth such translation.

This first volume contains most of the Adi Parva - "90 percent of Adi Parva", and contains 199 chapters and a little less than 6,500 shlokas. It contains 15 parvas (as per the 100 parva classification), and a little less than the entire Adi Parva (as per the 18-parva classification), and ends with the Rajya-labha Parvav (as per the 100-parva classification), where the Pandavas establish the partitioned region of Khandavaprastha as their kingdom, and turn it into Indraprastha through dint of hard work. The book is organized into "parva" and "adhyayas". There is no identification of the individual shlokas however.
If you include the Hari Vamsha, the number of shlokas in the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute's Mahabharata critical edition is a shade under 80,000. This first volume, then, represents a little over 8% of the entire work that is to be translated.

The first public retelling of the Mahabharata was done by the sage Vaishampayana, at King Janamejaya's snake sacrifice, and at Krishna Dvaipayana's (aka Ved Vyasa) instructions:

"Relate in full, exactly as you heard it from me, the account of the ancient quarrel between the Kurus and the Pnadavas." [Ch 54, Section VI, Adi-vamshavatarana Parva]

The story at this point begins with Vaishampayana starting off with the story of Uparichara (also known as Vasu), and the birth thereof Satyavati, and so on...

Before getting to this point however, which most consider a logical point to begin the story of the Mahabharata from, though some prefer starting even later, with the meeting of Shantanu and Ganga, the story has an elaborate digression (or pre-gression?)  into the world of snakes, the snake king Takshaka, before settling down to this territory that is more familiar to most of us.

Even as he starts to retell the story of Parikshit's ancestors, sage Vaishampayana, not knowing whether King Janameeya would be interested in the full story, rattles off the entire story of the epic in the three pages of a single adhyaya (chapter) in the Adi-vamshavatarana Parva. The king is not satisfied with this extra-concise summary, and requests the sage to elaborate:

"... But now I feel a great desire to hear this wonderful history in detail, with all descriptions. You should therefore recite it in its entirety. ... It cannot be for a trifling reason that the virtuous Pandavas killed those who should not be killed, and yet continue to be praised by men." [Chapter 56, Adi-vamshavatarana Parva]

What is good about this translation is that the translation itself is not needlessly archaic, nor does it seek to get lost in the minutiae of whether "krisna" or "krsna" or "Krishna" is the correct way to write the lord's name. No, it seeks instead to make the book accessible to the reader of today.
I will not go over a review of the entire book; rather, I will quote from the book excerpts and lines that I found to be particularly interesting, profound, or simply noteworthy.

Shakuntala, wife of Dushanta, mother of Bharata, daughter of the celestial apsara Menaka and rishi Vishwamitra, is not a timid, subservient lady seeking the benediction of the king in sanctifying their union. Rather, she is a strong-willed lady who is not afraid to speak her mind when angered, nor is she particularly upset or cares whether the king recognizes her as his wife or not.
Sample these lines spoken by her to King Dushanta, when he refuses to acknowledge their son, Bharata. She begins by enlightening him of the value of children, and sons in particular.

"
Those who have wives can be householders. Those who have wives are happy. Those who have wives have good fortune."
...
The wise have said that a man is himself born as his son. Therefore, a man should regard the mother of his son as his own mother.
...
The wife is the sacred ground in which the husband is born again.
" [Sambhava Parva, Chapter 68]

When the good king insults Shakuntala, saying, "I do no know you. Go away, as you please.", she is angered, and addresses him with harsh, harsh words.

"You see the faults of others, even though they are as small as a mustard seed. But you do not see your own, even though they can be seen as large as a bilva fruit.
...
O Dushanta! My birth is nobler than your own. O lord of kings! You are established on earth. But I roam the sky. Know the difference between you and me is that between a mustard seed and Mount Meru.
...
Like a pig searches out filth, the fool seeks out evil words when hears good and evil in men's speech. ... Those who seek no evil live happily. But fools are happy when they find evil.
" [Sambhava Parva, Chapter 69]

Ouch! That's not a demure, subservient woman. Hats off to the strong-willed lady. In some ways, we can also witness the gradual decline in the standing of women in society, from the strong-willed and independent Shakuntala to the equally strong-willed Droupadi, but who is married off to five brothers, then bartered away to the Kouravas in a crooked game of dice by her husbands, and then humiliated in front of a court by her brothers-in-law, even as her husbands stand as mute spectators. This is also a point that Devdutt Pattanaik raises in his excellent book, Jaya, pointing out that the status of women in Indian society sees a deplorable as traced in the Mahabharata.

The akashvani ("disembodied voice from the sky") ends the conflict between wife and husband, even as Shakuntala is about to walk off and out from the king's court, by telling all present that Bharata is indeed Dushanta's son.

"Born from the father, the son is the father himself."

Later on, when Devayani curses Kacha for refusing to marry her:

 "...your knowledge will never achieve success.", Kacha replied, "Nevertheless, you have cursed me, not out of dharma, but out of desire. Therefore, your desire will never be satisfied. ... You have said that my knowledge will never bear fruit. So be it. But it will bear fruit for the one I teach it to." [Sambhava Parva, Chapter 72]

This exchange led me to wonder whether the same does not hold true, in some ways at least, in modern society, with those who teach and those who create and run businesses. The truly knowledgeable teachers are truly the repositories of knowledge and expertise in our society, but it is their students, who they teach this knowledge to, who go out in the world and create enterprises that bear the fruit of this knowledge. I wonder...

The story of Parikshit is quite an interesting one. Here is a person who was born as a direct result of divine intervention from Lord Krishna, who brought him to life after he had been killed in his mother's womb by Ashwatthama. It is for this reason that Parikishit is also known as the posthumous son of Abhimanyu, since he was still-born, and only later revived by the Lord. And yet, Parikishit's end was quite a gory one, bitten to death by a serpent, his body set aflame as a result of the serpent's poison. That apart, this particular line is a grim reminder of the power of words. Words spoken in jest, words spoken in anger, even words spoken with the most honest of intentions can have consequences. Parikishit, in his finite wisdom, thought he was only doing the world of sages a good, by uttering the words he did. Little could he have realized the prophetic nature of his words. Therefore, think before you speak.

"The sun is setting. Today, I no longer have any fear from poison. Therefore, let this worm become Takshaka and bite me. Let the words of the hermit become true and let a falsehood not be committed." [Astika Parva, Chapter 39]

...
"Having said this, the king of kings smilingly placed the small worm on his throat, about to die and robbed of his senses. He was still laughing when Takshaka, who had come out of the fruit that had been given to the king, coiled around him." [Section V, Astika Parva, Chapter 39]

In a karmic way, the noble king had but himself to blame for his horrific death. In some sense, he actually invited his own death. Or we can say that our actions inform our destiny.

In these turbulent times that we live in today, where the corrupt roam free and where their crimes are condoned by those in power, these lines from the Mahabharata sound eerily prescient. Those in power would do well to read them.

But if a crime doesn't find a punisher, many in the worlds will commit crimes. A man who has the power to punish a crime and doesn't do so, despite knowing that a crime has been committed, is himself tainted by the deed, even if he is the lord. [Ch 172, Chaitraratha Parva]

In this first volume, the lord, Krishna, makes an appearance only in the Droupadi-Svayamvara Parva, at Droupadi's svayamvar. The Hari Vamsha, a little over 6000 shlokas in the Critical Edition, recounts in detail the history of Krishna. This is however considered a supplement to the Mahabharata. I believe that Bibek Debroy intends covering Hari Vamsha at the end, perhaps as Vol X?

In the critical edition, there is no mention that Droupadi forbade Karna from attempting to string the bow at her swayamvar. Later, in the second volume, we read that it was not Droupadi but the other Pandavas that laughed aloud at Duryodhana's missteps in the Maya Sabha at Indraprastha. Both these incidents, or rather, the lack of Droupadi's involvement in these incidents, and more specifically, culpability, does raise interesting questions. Droupadi was even more innocent of the crimes perpetrated on her during the game of dice. When did these incidents get added to the Mahabharata - where Droupadi, perhaps at Krishna's behest, prohibits Karna from attempting the svayamvar, by stating he was of inferior birth, and then in the palace of the Pandavas where she laughs at Duryodhana's missteps, contemptuously referring to him as the blind son of the blind king ("andhe ka andha" - which, when said in Hindi, hurts even more)? Were these later interpolations meant to try and justify the acts of the Kauravas later on? Or were they meant to interject a sense of cause-and-effect? A karmic cause to Droupadi's sufferings?

• Mahabharata, Vol. 2, translated by Bibek Debroy (India Plaza, Flipkart)
• Mahabharata, Vol. 3, translated by Bibek Debroy (Penguin Books, Infibeam, India Plaza, Flipkart)
• Mahabharata, Vol. 4, translated by Bibek Debroy (Penguin Books, India Plaza, Flipkart)
• https://twitter.com/#!/bibekdebroy
• Bibek Debroy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
• Penguin Books India page for Bibek Debroy
• Clay Sanskrit Library
• Mahabharata Book Two: The Great Hall (Bk. 2), Clay Sanskrit Institute
• NYU Press - The Clay Sanskrit Library: Mahabharata
• The Mahabharata, Volume 1: Book 1: The Book of the Beginning, van Buitenen (University of Chicago Press)
• The Mahabharata, Volume 1 edited by JAB van Buitenen (Google Books)

In India, Flipkart offers amazing service and blazingly fast deliveries (a less than 24-hour turnaround time from order to delivery is not uncommon!). They are selling the book for Rs 440, a healthy 20% discount off the list price of Rs 550 (I re-checked and this is now whittled down to a 14% discount, with a net selling price of Rs 471, a real pity). However, you may also want to check out other sites like Infibeam, that is selling the book for Rs 407, and IndiaPlaza, which is selling the book at a whopping 40% discount, for Rs 330 - truly a bargain.

© 2012, Abhinav Agarwal. All rights reserved.

7 Secrets Of Vishnu, By Devdutt Pattanaik-review

7 Secrets Of Vishnu, By Devdutt Pattanaik - Abhinav's review
(Flipkart, Infibeam, Amazon.com, my review on Amazon.com)

Insightful and readable as all of the author's books, but this one has a somewhat hurried feel to it.

The author covers briefly the trinity in Hinduism, Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva. After that the book dwells on Vishnu, looked at primarily from the prism of the avatars of the lord - all ten of them, the Dashavatar.
The most fascinating chapter is the first one, "Mohini's Secret, which describes how Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva are connected to each other.

Each avatar is unique, each the result of the needs of the time, and each with its learnings. The avatar of Narasimha avatar is a powerful reminder of the limitations of the human imagination, as Hiranyakashyap learns.

(the Hiranyakashyipu) "episode in Vishnu lore is a reminder that divinity cannot be limited by human imagination or human memory. There is always something in the universe that surprises us." [page 105]

The Vamana avatar and the Bali episode teaches us about the human ego. We are so consumed with a sense of our own importance, so much so that we are deluded into thinking we are omnipotent. Three paces of land is what Vamana asked for, and three paces of land is what Bali, the all-powerful king and grandson of Prahalad, could not provide.

"In Vishnu lore, there is a general discomfort with the idea of offering people whatever they desire. A man who offers another whatever he or she desires is in effect being arrogant and over-estimating his capability and capacity." [page 113]

"The idea of bad gods and good demons is confounding. But it emerges from the presumption that the division of gods and demons is made on ethical and moral terms. This is, more often than not, the result of poor English translations of Hindu mythology in the 18th century, which declared Devas as "good" and Asuras as "bad"." [page 117]

"The word evil is often used to describe Asuras. But this word 'evil' makes no sense in Hinduism. Evil means the 'absence of God'. This idea does not exist in Hinduism because, for Hindus, the whole world is a manifestation of the divine. So, nothing can be evil." [page 119]

• http://devdutt.com/7-secrets-of-vishnu/
• 7 Secrets Of Vishnu fr`om Flipkart.com
• http://www.crossword.in/books/7-secrets-vishnu-rs-250/p-books-9789380658681.html
• www.infibeam.com/Books/7-secrets-vishnu-devdutt-pattanaik/9789380658681.html

© 2012, Abhinav Agarwal. All rights reserved.

The Immortals of Meluha, Amish Tripathi - My Review

The Immortals of Meluha, by Amish Tripathi - my review (Amazon, Flipkart, Infibeam, Landmark, user review on Amazon.com)

Fascinating premise, full of promise. That remains unfulfilled.

The legend of Siva would be fertile ground for authors to adapt from and weave magical tales of adventure from. But only for the talented and hard-working. This book reflects neither talent nor hard work. The fascinating premise remains just that.

What if the legend of Siva, the destroyer of evil, was not a legend, but something that began with an actual human; that acquired the proportions of legend and finally myth over the course of centuries and millenia, because of the astounding feats of that single person?

Unfortunately, this novel is not a fruition of that premise. There are several, several problems with this novel. The simplistic plot, over-simplistic I would call it, for one. It stumbles forward in a linear manner without any surprises or twists that you cannot pick out from a mile away. The narration. The dialog between the characters is evocative of a television soap-opera, at best. Siva is not the yogi in control of his senses; he is some post-adolescent youth in search for adventure.

'I have seen the bed, dammit!' grinned Shiva. 'Now I want to experience it. Get out!'

Yes, some sort of a grotesque cross between a Karan Johar and Ekta Kapoor movie's dialogues.

Some of the descriptions of Meluhan society (the Suryavanshis, the people inhabiting the Saraswati river basin) are terrifyingly reminiscent more of Soviet-style totalitarian regimes than a caring, humane society. Children are deposited after child-birth at some grand orphanage, called a Gurukul; mothers made to forcibly abandon their children a few weeks after childbirth, and then doled out to wanna-be parents on the basis of a lottery?! Seriously, such hair-brained and frankly inhuman concepts have never been part of Indian society and culture, ever! Why, they have not been part of any society in human history, ever, anywhere, I should think. Yet, this is presented as a stroke of genius that does away with the evils of the caste system. Without an understanding of the caste system, its utility, or lack thereof, in a society at a given point in time, whatever that may have been, the author takes it upon himself to purge society of this evil with another evil; only this time the replacement is infinitely more evil and inhuman than the system it seeks to replace.

The descriptions of the Indus Valley and Saraswati Harappan civilization dwellings are barely beyond what one would conjure up after spending 15 minutes on Wikipedia. Even here there was so much promise that remains exasperatingly unfulfilled.

Siva is yogeswar. His detachment from the physical world is the complement to the material world signified by Vishnu. Yet Siva in this book comes off as some lost, confused soul, in search of a Bollywood movie plot where he can journey to some exotic country and find himself. Which in itself the anti-thesis of Hindu Vedic philosophy, which states that what is within is also without. You are that. Not here, evidently. The other side of the Suryavanshi Meluhans, the Chandravanshis, and their capital Ayodhya, ends up being drawn with a very simple and very crude palette. It is a crude caricature of a ghetto. The author tries to portray the two societies as opposite sides of the same coin, but fails, pretty much as in every other place of the novel.

I really, really wanted to like this book. I kept persevering; 50 pages, 100 pages, waiting for the plot and pace to pick, the narrative to improve. But it didn't. To make sure I was doing justice to the author, I did read to the very last page, which ends up with a very, very contrived hook to the second book in the trilogy. I refuse to bite.

Sorry, this book does not even flatter to deceive. I can only suppose that the success of this book is perhaps more the result of smart  marketing than anything substantial. I can only thank myself that the price of reading this book was a couple of hours of time, that I shall however never get back, and twenty-five rupees in rental, that I don't mind as much.

As a friend remarked, the best and the really good and intelligent part of the book is its cover.

You can read Chapter 1 (PDF) of the novel from its website, http://shivatrilogy.com/

© 2012, Abhinav Agarwal. All rights reserved.

The Alchemist by Paul Coelho - Review

The Alchemist by Paul Coelho (Amazon, Kindle, Flipkart, Infibeam, my user review on Amazon) - my review

The journey of a shepherd from his country to Egypt and then back, in search of a treasure. Simple but moving story. The king, the merchant, the alchemist - all teach him a little bit about himself and the world we all live in.

This is a short and simple story about a young shepherd's journey from his home in Spain in search of a treasure, that is supposedly near the Pyramids in Egypt. Along the way he meets several people; it is a gypsy woman sets him off on his quest; a king offers him two stones to guide him on his way. The merchant and later the alchemist help him learn the lessons of life that the journey is meant to teach.

At the end of the book I had to admit that the story is moving enough  make you think about if after you left the book. However, I could not see why it has become the international phenomenon that it has - maybe the brevity, the simplicity of the message.

“And, when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.”
If you are a Hindi movie fan, you will recognize this line as appearing several times in the Shahrukh Khan starrer, "Om Shanti Om" (on-demand video), directed by eminent choreographer Farah Khan. Uncredited, of course.

Here are a couple of excerpts from the book that I found enlightening:

“You should pay more attention to the caravan,” the boy said to the Englishman, after the camel driver had left. “We make a lot of detours, but we’re always heading for the same destination.” “And you ought to read more about the world,” answered the Englishman. “Books are like caravans in that respect.”

“Isn’t wine prohibited here?” the boy asked “It’s not what enters men’s mouths that’s evil,” said the alchemist. “It’s what comes out of their mouths that is.”

The Alchemist (novel) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Paulo Coelho's Official Website




Kindle Excerpt:

© 2012, Abhinav Agarwal. All rights reserved.

The Filter Bubble by Eli Pariser - Review

The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding From You, by Eli Pariser - my review (Amazon, Kindle, Flipkart, Infibeam, my user review on Amazon.com)

My review: A City of Ghettos or Mosaic of Subcultures? Excellent book, but its at-times skim-ish coverage is a missed opportunity.

Makes us aware of the risks that the increasingly pervasive and invisible personalization of content on the Internet poses to innovation and creativity, not to mention privacy and liberty. An in-depth look at the technology of data laundering would have elevated the book from very good to truly outstanding.

The premise of the Internet was to open up worlds of information and bring them to our homes via our computers - information that had remained inaccessible to people for a variety of reasons like cost, access, and more. While this premise still exists and has been made possible to a large extent, the increasing amount of personalization of content - done by regular news websites, shopping sites, social media, and search engines -  results in showing us more of what we already know or what we like, and hides what these sites think and decide we do not want to or would not like to view.

This personalization is more pervasive, and in most cases, more invasive of our privacy, than most people realize. Web sites track our clicks, our pageviews, where we come from, where we go, how much time we spend on different sites, what keywords we have searched for, details about our physical location, the types of devices we access these sites from - the type of computer, the browser, the operating system, and more. This rich trove of information allows sites and companies to build detailed dossiers on hundreds of millions of users. If done by governments this would be deemed intolerably intrusive and something done only by totalitarian regimes. However, such gathering of highly personal data when done in the commercial world of the Internet is par for the course.  "...here’s what Acxiom knows about 96 percent of American households and half a billion people worldwide: the names of their family members, their current and past addresses, how often they pay their credit card bills whether they own a dog or a cat (and what breed it is), whether they are righthanded or left-handed, what kinds of medication they use (based on pharmacy records) ... the list of data points is about 1,500 items long." [location 593]
Scary? Well, here is an example of what even a short visit to a nondescript site like www.dictionary.com can do to your computer:

Search for a word like “depression” on Dictionary.com, and the site installs up to 223 tracking cookies and beacons on your computer so that other Web sites can target you with antidepressants. [location 140]

...

BlueCava is compiling a database of every computer, smartphone, and online-enabled gadget in the world, which can be tied to the individual people who use them. [location 1420]

In my own experience, visiting a respectable site like LinkedIn.com resulted in 30 cookies being placed on my computer (see screenshots below). I did not count the beacons placed, but I suspect there were more than a few of those too placed on my computer.

You can run, but you can't hide from the tracking that happens on the Internet.

Say you check out a pair of running sneakers online but leave the site without springing for them. If the shoe site you were looking at uses retargeting, their ads—maybe displaying a picture of the exact sneaker you were just considering—will follow you around the Internet, showing up next to the scores from last night’s game or posts on your favorite blog. And if you finally break down and buy the sneakers? Well, the shoe site can sell that piece of information to BlueKai to auction it off to, say, an athletic apparel site. Pretty soon you’ll be seeing ads all over the Internet for sweat-wicking socks. [location 609]

Tracking by itself may not be very palatable to users and consumers. But where it has the potential to turn decidedly ominous is when you consider the uses to which such information could be put to.

In some cases, algorithmic sorting based on personal data can be even more discriminatory than people would be. [location 1645]

Banks are beginning to use social data to decide to whom to offer loans: [location 1681]
...
...LinkedIn, the social job-hunting site, offers a career trajectory prediction site; [location 1686]
...As a service to customers, it’s pretty useful. But imagine if LinkedIn provided that data to corporate clients to help them weed out people who are forecast to be losers. [location 1690]

By tracking us as we traverse the web, the web (mostly Google, Facebook, and Amazon are the examples the author uses) tracks our clicks, our pageviews, over a period of time, and then shows us a personalized version of the content, stripping out news stories that are contrary to our political views - as determined by these trackers and personalizers. We end up living in an invisible echo chamber that shows us what the chamber thinks we like seeing. This will stifle creativity and innovation. "Creativity is often sparked by the collision of ideas from different disciplines and cultures. Combine an understanding of cooking and physics and you get the nonstick pan and the induction stovetop."

It seems our brains are forever balancing a cognitive tightrope "between the conflicting tendencies to learn" too much from the past" and "incorporating too much new information from the present" [location 1085].

However, "personalized filters can upset this cognitive balance" by surrounding "us with ideas with which we’re already familiar (and already agree), making us overconfident in our mental frameworks." - perpetuating a confirmation bias of sorts. "Second, it removes from our environment some of the key prompts that make us want to learn ... It can block what researcher Travis Proulx calls “meaning threats,” the confusing, unsettling occurrences that fuel our desire to understand and acquire new ideas. [locations 1088, 1157]

Or to put it in other words, what if all you kept seeing were white swans, some system were to determine that you were not interested in seeing black swans, and when a black swan did in fact appear, it were to be hidden from your view. It would only end up reinforcing this very middle-of-the-ground view of the world being inhabited by ONLY white swans. And we know the perils of ignoring black swans.

Furthermore, innovation is sparked by curiosity. According to psychologist George Lowenstein, curiosity is aroused when we’re presented with an “information gap.”

Democracy requires citizens to see things from one another’s point of view, but instead we’re more and more enclosed in our own bubbles. Democracy requires a reliance on shared facts; instead we’re being offered parallel but separate universes. [location 128]

But the filter bubble isn’t tuned for a diversity of ideas or of people. It’s not designed to introduce us to new cultures. [location 1309]

Listening to a radio station, or reading a newspaper, or watching a news channel, you are aware, to some degree at least, that there is a point of view that the newspaper, or radio, or TV channel holds. The choice to switch is yours. Not so with the web.

"On the Internet, personalized filters could promote the same kind of intense, narrow focus you get from a drug like Adderall" - which works by increasing levels of the neurotransmitter norepinephrine, which, for one, "reduces our sensitivity to new stimuli."

As Cropley points out in Creativity in Education and Learning, the physicist Niels Bohr famously demonstrated this type of creative dexterity when he was given a university exam at the University of Copenhagen in 1905. One of the questions asked students to explain how they would use a barometer (an instrument that measures atmospheric pressure) to measure the height of a building. Bohr clearly knew what the instructor was going for: Students were supposed to check the atmospheric pressure at the top and bottom of the building and do some math. Instead, he suggested a more original method: One could tie a string to the barometer, lower it, and measure the string—thinking of the instrument as a “thing with weight.” The unamused instructor gave him a failing grade—his answer, after all, didn’t show much understanding of physics. Bohr appealed, this time offering four solutions: You could throw the barometer off the building and count the seconds until it hit the ground (barometer as mass); you could measure the length of the barometer and of its shadow, then measure the building’s shadow and calculate its height (barometer as object with length); you could tie the barometer to a string and swing it at ground level and from the top of the building to determine the difference in gravity (barometer as mass again); or you could use it to calculate air pressure. [location 1282]

On the topic of fitting information to suit the user, a natural and ominous extension is the area of censorship and big brother - governmental surveillance of its citizenry. When talking of censorship the foremost country that comes to mind is China. Interestingly, the author points out that China does not need to wield a heavy hammer and censor anything and everything it deems inappropriate. Injecting sufficient distortions can also have be just as effective, and with perhaps better results. Censorship need not be absolute as in China. It can be subtle, it can be voluntary, and it can be almost completely invisible, discernible only after careful scrutiny.

China’s objective isn’t so much to blot out unsavory information as to alter the physics around it—to create friction for problematic information [location 1760]

Rather than decentralizing power, as its early proponents predicted, in some ways the Internet is concentrating it. [location 1786]
As long as a database exists, it’s potentially accessible by the state. That’s why gun rights activists talk a lot about Alfred Flatow. [location 1823]

When Amazon booted the activist Web site WikiLeaks off its servers under political pressure in 2010, the site immediately collapsed—there was nowhere to go. [location 1842]

Because of the economies of scale in data, the cloud giants are increasingly powerful. And because they’re so susceptible to regulation, these companies have a vested interest in keeping government entities happy. [location 1848]

Just as black holes can be detected only by the absence of light, similarly, sometimes censorship can be detected only by noting the absence of terms and words that are otherwise to be found in freer societies.

In December 2010, researchers at Harvard, Google, Encyclopædia Britannica, and the American Heritage Dictionary announced the results of a four-year joint effort. The team had built a database spanning the entire contents of over five hundred years’ worth of books—5.2 million books in total, in English, French, Chinese, German, and other languages. Now any visitor to Google’s “N-Gram viewer” page can query it and watch how phrases rise and fall in popularity over time, [location 2526]
And, they argued, the tool could provide “a powerful tool for automatically identifying censorship and propaganda” by identifying countries and languages in which there was a statistically abnormal absence of certain ideas or phrases. [location 2533, emphasis mine]

The constant, unending flow of personal data of Internet users from one server to another, from one company's database to another's, being enriched by the merging of even more personal information, is made possible because data can move with little friction over the web, and because it is so difficult to trace. Like money laundering, data laundering becomes not only possible but possible on a massive scale when done using the Internet.

Data are uniquely suited to gray-market activities, because they need not carry any trace of where they have come from or where they have been along the way. Wright calls this data laundering, and it’s already well under way: [location 2700]

The author comes down harshly on both Google and Facebook for trying to have it their way...

Too often, the executives of Facebook, Google, and other socially important companies play it coy: They’re social revolutionaries when it suits them and neutral, amoral businessmen when it doesn’t. And both approaches fall short in important ways.
...
Facebook describes itself as a “social utility,” as if it’s a twenty-first-century phone company. But when users protest Facebook’s constantly shifting and eroding privacy policy, Zuckerberg often shrugs it off with the caveat emptor posture that if you don’t want to use Facebook, you don’t have to.
...
Google’s founders also sometimes play a get-out-of-jail-free card.

In conclusion, a very common-sensical proposal, almost forty years old and yet mostly valid even today, lies unenforced and mostly forgotten, because it is not in the interests of those who profit from collecting information on their users to do so.

In 1973, the Department of Housing, Education, and Welfare under Nixon recommended that regulation center on what it called Fair Information Practices:
- You should know who has your personal data, what data they have, and how it’s used.
- You should be able to prevent information collected about you for one purpose from being used for others.
- You should be able to correct inaccurate information about you.
- Your data should be secure.
Nearly forty years later, the principles are still basically right, and we’re still waiting for them to be enforced.

This is a very important and very timely book on a very important topic. In that sense this book is a must-read for everyone who spends time on the Internet and has invested in creating a social identity on the net.

On the other hand, this book also falls short on at least one important area. I was expecting at least some in-depth look at how personalizations on the Internet works. This is a lost opportunity in my opinion. As in such books intended for a broad audience, the thinking tends to keep the book non-technical and technojargon-free. However, that comes at a price. The price paid is that the reader gets little in-depth understanding of the issues involved. We know that personalization exists. However, how does it actually work? Yes, there are massive data sets involved. There is data crunching at massive levels - think of Hadoop, Big Table, MapReduce, NoSQL, etc... working on clusters of tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of computers. There are data mining algorithms at work here, finely tuned to extract the most insightful of correlations between seemingly disparate pieces of information. Yes. However, take a specific case of a user browsing or searching for a keyword, and then follow the user and the personalization that is attached to that piece of information. Show to the user that cookie, and the tags associated with it, and the path that the information takes as it follows us from a Google search page to a news page where that a contextual, personalized ad is served up.

Or to take another case. The author notes that it is "becoming more important to develop a basic level of algorithmic literacy.". Ok, no issue there; I would tend to wholeheartedly agree with the author. But then what? How? There is a suggestion that we learn basic programming - a quite radical a suggestion from a book aimed at the masses Laudable. But where does that take the average Internet user? How does knowing programming, and having a basic level of "algorithmic literacy" help me become better aware of the way cookies and persistent Flash objects work, or prevent them from tracking me? These are questions that the book could have, should have, answered. But it doesn't.

That is missing from this book. And that is a pity in my opinion. It would have elevated the book from the  very good and timely to truly outstanding.

In closing, I would say that this book is an important addition to the literature that seeks to provide a counter-argument to the wholly uncritical and the absolute way in which the Internet is viewed by technophiles. There are at least two other books I would recommend to people interested in this topic:

• The Shallows, by Nicholas Carr
• The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires

Some other books and articles referenced in the book:

•  “Do Artifacts Have Politics?”
• Bowling Alone, by Robert Putnam
• Alexander, Christopher, Sara Ishikawa, and Murray Silverstein. A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction. 
• Battelle, John. The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture. 
• Conley, Dalton. Elsewhere, U.S.A.: How We Got from the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, BlackBerry Moms, and Economic Anxiety
• Solove, Daniel J. Understanding Privacy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008. 
• Sunstein, Cass R. Republic.com 2.0. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007
• Wu, Tim. The Master Switch : The Rise and Fall of Information Empires (my review, blog post)
• Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson, “Teachers’ Expectancies: Determinants of Pupils’ IQ Gains,” Psychological Reports, 19 (1966)
• The Filter Bubble - Books by Eli Pariser - Penguin Group (USA)
• The Filter Bubble - Official book page
• Filter bubble - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
• The Shallows, by Nicholas Carr
• The Googlization of Everything
• What Technology Wants, by Kevin Kelly

Kindle Excerpt:

© 2012, Abhinav Agarwal. All rights reserved.