Sesh Venugopal's Blog, page 2

Beyond HappinessLast week, during one of my web browsing...

Beyond Happiness

Last week, during one of my web browsing sessions looking for interesting material to read, I came across an article that had been published in the New York Times more than a year ago. The title intrigued me: “A New Gauge to See What’s Beyond Happiness.” It appeared on May 16, 2011. I was surprised I had missed it at that time, because I read the New York Times every day and also because the subject of happiness - what it is, how to get it, how to keep it - intrigues me.

Many books have been published on this subject, of course, and I own a few of them. Dan Gilbert, a Harvard psychologist, wrote that humans tend to overestimate the effect of perceived future loss, and also perceived future happiness. In other words, we tend to think of the future as worse than we would actually experience it to be when it arrives (if I am unemployed I will die), and better than it would be when we imagine something that we think would make us extremely happy (winning the lottery is fine, but very soon we go back to right where we were before). That is, we are great at adapting to highs and lows, in a way that essentially results in a flat line of “being”. This leads me to believe we are born with an innate disposition to be happy at some level, and while to some extent this level can rise or fall because of the environment, the difference is rather small.

In “Happier: Learn  the Secrets To Daily Joy and Lasting Fulfillment”, Tal Ben-Shahar defines happiness as the overall experience of pleasure and meaning. His book arose out of a positive psychology course he taught at Harvard. More on positive psychology when we check in with Martin Seligman, who more or less invented the discipline (or quasi-discipline) of “positive psychology”, and who is the subject of the article with which I led this post. For now, the question that arises is: how do we measure the overall experience of pleasure and meaning. How much of it do we need to be happy? I read through Happier expecting some deep insight, but didn’t really get that much. It is worth noting thought that Ben-Shahar makes meaning an integral part of happiness: how meaningful we think our life is has a lot to do with how happy we are.

I won’t go into the details of the other books I have read or skimmed through, but I should note them here because they did hold my attention enough to justify their purchase. There’s Jonathan Haidt’s, “The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom”. Haidt is a social psychologist, and his approach to finding what happiness is all about and how to be happy lies in going back to the teachings and writings of the ancients. To which I ask the question: would the ancients have been as happy had they access to smartphones and Facebook? David DiSalvo takes a neuro-cognitive tack in his quest to unravel the secrets of happiness. His “What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite,” examines the conflict between the power of hardwired behavior (instinct) and rational overrides, and suggests that we have to take charge and steer our brain toward happiness in a very conscious manner. Sort of like the Buddhist “mindful awareness.” Automatic response is out, calculated action is in.

Finally, we arrive at Seligman’s, “Authentic Happiness”. The sub-title of the book is, “Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment.” Seligman originated the “positive psychology” movement, and this book details what the movement is all about. The takeaway from this book is his happiness formula:

         H = S + C + V

where H is your enduring level of happiness, S is your set range (genetically predisposed), C is the circumstance of your life, and V represents factors under your voluntary control. According to him, about 50% of how happy we are (enduringly) depends on our genes, and cannot be changes. That’s a hefty proportion!

Now, back to  the article I started out with. Seligman now thinks that happiness is overrated!! Now wait a minute. Does this mean the pursuing happiness would be barking up the wrong tree? Apparently Seligman now regrets the title “Authentic Happiness” he gave to his book. I want to jump to the end of that article, where Seligman is quoted as saying: “One’s job as a therapist is not to change what people value, but given what they value, to make them better at it.”

So, in a nutshell, we have been thinking about happiness all wrong. Everyone is not happy in the same way. There is no universal prescription for happiness. You have to find what “values” or goals (being the best swimmer in the world, or being the best mother you can be, etc.) you care most about, and do your darnest to live by them. As simple as that.

I’ll leave you with another intriguing thought. Paul Theroux opens his book “My Secret History”, like this: I was born poor in rich America, yet my secret instincts were better than money and were for me a source of power. I had advantages that no one could take away from me—a clear memory and brilliant dreams and a knack for knowing when I was happy.

Do you actually know you are happy when you are happy? Or is it always a thing of the past. “Oh yeah, those were the happiest days of my life.”

Recent Reads

I just finished reading “The Racketeer” by John Grisham. I gave it 4 stars on Goodreads, following my ratings algorithm (see my recent post on “Rating Books”). Grisham’s books are quick reads, and don’t leave much of an impression after you’re done except that it was fun while it lasted. Yesterday at Barnes and Noble, I saw that it was #1 on the New York Times bestseller list. Not shabby.

Before the Grisham book, I read Jo Nesbo’s “Phantom”, which I liked more. I gave it 4 stars as well, but it really should get 4.5 stars because I got into it quite some more than “The Racketeer”. Nesbo’s books are gritty, tightly plotted, the characters very well drawn. Harry Hole, the detective, reminds me a lot of Arkady Renko (in Martin Cruz Smith’s Moscow crime novels) but is a tad less appealing. I have read every single book of Nesbo’s and he is definitely my most favorite Nordic crime fiction writer.

Lee Child’s “A Wanted Man” was a disappointment. I gave up with about 30 pages to go. I used to be a big fan of Lee Child’s but the charm has worn thin. His books are only half-way interesting now, very repetitious. I get the feeling he’s under the gun by the publisher to churn out these bestsellers in quick time, and he is not able to do justice to his stories any more. In keeping with my policy of not giving more than 3 stars to books I give up on, he gets 3 stars. That said, the first 100 some pages are great: Jack Reacher hitches a ride, and finds himself in a car with two bad guys and a kidnapped woman. What does Jack do?

Going a little further back, in September I read Jonathan Franzen’s “The Corrections”. The book had come out ten years ago, but I never got around to reading it until now. In fact, I read his newer book, “Freedom” a few months ago, and was so impressed that I decided to read “The Corrections.” I liked the book a lot. The writing is scintillating. My only qualm in giving the book 5 stars was that I found the characters somewhat distant. So I gave 4.

I am looking forward to reading Nelson DeMille’s “The Panther” next.

Opening Lines

There is no better way to get the reader hooked than a strong opening. The first paragraph, or even better, that very first line of a book can make a statement like nothing else, pulling the reader in with a compelling promise.

One of my favorite opening lines is from Paul Theroux’s memoir of friendship with V.S. Naipaul, “Sir Vidia’s Shadow”: It is a good thing that time is a light, because so much of life is mumbling shadows and the future is just silence and darkness. Superbly evocative, this opening sets the tone for the entire book. When you first read, you are struck by its sheer lyricality and sense of pathos. When you finish the book and return to that first line, it makes perfect sense, adding substance to atmosphere.

I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice—not because of his voice, or because he was the smartest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother’s death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany. This is John Irving’s opening, in “A Prayer for Owen Meany.” When I read this, I couldn’t help but wonder how on earth Irving came up with this opening. He must have taken the rest of the day off to celebrate!

From two thousand feet, where Claudette Sanders was taking a flying lesson, the town of Chester’s Mill gleamed in the morning light like something freshly made and just set down. Stephen King opens his “Under the Dome” with this fairly harmless sentence—just another beautiful day in Chester’s Mill. But two things make this opening special for me. One, as a long-time Stephen King reader, I just know that the shit will hit the fan before long, which makes the opening deliciously ominous. And two, just notice that turn of phrase, “like something freshly made and just set down.” Such delightful imagery with a few simple words. That’s just devilishly good writing.

Of course not all books have openings this striking. I was just thinking of Jonathan Franzen’s “The Corrections” and “Freedom”, and neither of them has a remarkable opening. I wonder if these established authors obsess about openings like the newbies. What strikes me about these openings is they seems so appropriate, so not forced. It seems to me that once in a while that perfect phrase, that perfect line, that perfect sentence just sort of happens to come by and you just have to be alert enough to grab it and write it down.

Then again, it seems to happen to John Irving more often than to most other writers. Here’s the first line from “The Fourth Hand”: Imagine a young man on his way to a less-than-thirty-second event—the loss of his left hand, long before he reached middle age.

Rating Books

After I got on Goodreads, I first rated books that I had read before I joined, some of which I had read many years back. I had only partial recall of the content of most of them, so how to rate? I went with the general feeling I had after reading them, to the extent that that feeling still persisted. So, for instance, I rated highly many of the Wilbur Smith books I had read as a teenager (!) because the moment I think of any of his books, I am overwhelmed with fondness for that magical storytelling ability of his that had held me captive for hours on end. Similarly for Frederick Forsyth (who can ever forget “The Day of the Jackal”?), Alistair MacLean (“Guns of Navarone”, “Puppet on a Chain”), Robert Ludlum (“The Matlock Paper”, “The Scarlatti Inheritance”, “The Bourne Identity”) and others I had read over the years.

But for the books I read (and am reading) after I joined Goodreads, I started being more parsimonious while attributing stars. I don’t think I have given five stars to more than a small handful, and I have close to 500 books up now. I felt that people — other than the author — actually cared about ratings, so I should be more prudent. But how to be objective about it, especially with novels? Fiction is non-linear by definition, you can’t expect any particular structure, or even a sense of cohesion. If you want that, you should read non-fiction. (As I write this I recall “The God of Small Things,” by Arundhati Roy, which is the very antithesis of the boring MFA-stamped books that I see everywhere nowadays.)

After some thought, I came up with a simple scheme to rate books. If I finished it, it would get at least 4 stars. (I have given up on many books with just 20 or 30 pages to go, because I just didn’t think it was worth finishing, and I had only gotten so far by gritting my teeth and being charitable. Right now I have just given up on Lee Child’s “A Wanted Man” with only 25 pages to go! And I have read through ALL previous Lee Child books with carnivorous zip.) If I didn’t finish a book, but got through more than half way, it would not get more than 3 stars. And I didn’t even get half way through the book before giving up, it would get no more than 2 stars. (All of James Patterson’s books get 1 star - every time I go to the bookstore I see a book of his in the New York Times top 10 bestseller section, and I open to  the first page and can barely stomach the first paragraph! The 1 star is for sheer perseverance.)

Go ahead, respect yourself, and your precious time. Don’t feel obliged to finish a book just because you started it. And rejoice in the new-found sense of freedom!!

Book Excerpt, "The Blind Spot"

“I didn’t see it coming until it was almost too late. Memories that
had lain low in sepia-tinted dormancy took courage at my weakened state and sprang to life, speeding forward through time, laying every treasured event at my feet like they had happened yesterday. Except the people in those events were missing. My mom had long left me, and my dad was a different person, getting stranger by the day.”

http://www.amazon.com/The-Blind-Spot-ebook/dp/B009FFMGH6/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1350675031&sr=8-1&keywords=sesh+venugopal+blind+spot

Nobel Prize Season

It’s Nobel Prize season again and this time the winner in literature is China’s Mo Yan. I must confess I had never heard of him (and I have a feeling I am not alone here) but the world is a big place, and it’s hard to keep up with everything. Mo Yan is said to draw “intricate portraits of Chinese rural life” and his style had been compared to that of the “South American magical realists”.

It seems to me that the works of Nobel Prize winners are read widely (by which I mean by readers from all walks of life, not just other writers or students of literature) only after they get the prize and appear on people’s radar. I can’t imagine the Nobel committee awarding the prize to someone who has contributed to a particular genre while at the same time being an entertainer, and is already well-known and acclamied - someone, say, like Stephen King, or J.K. Rowling. I don’t believe the literature prize has a requirement that a candidate’s work be only fiction, in which case I might even put forth, say, Paul Theroux, who has done more for travel writing in the 20th century than anyone else.

One could say that the relatively famous writers are already making so much money, and they don’t need the prize to get their work in the hands of millions of readers, but that would be like saying we can’t give Steve Jobs the innovator of the decade award because he doesn’t need it. One might argue that the Nobel Prize is awarded to those whose important work may never otherwise be recognized. And there may be truth to this; all you need to do is take a gander at the winners in the last ten years:

2012: Mo Yan

2011: Tomas Tranströmer

2010: Mario Vargas Llosa

2009: Herta Müller

2008: Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio

2007: Doris Lessing

2006: Orhan Pamuk

2005: Harold Pinter

2004: Elfriede Jelinek

2003: John M. Coetzee

Recognize any of them? Know what they wrote about?

When I come across writers whom I have never heard of before, but are revealed to be  Nobel Prize winners, I am seized with a desire to read their books. But as often as not, many of them are uphill climbs. I suppose I could slog through such a book, just to say that I read it, but I’m not into that kind of self-flagellation. Mostly, a book is just a book. You like it, and read all the way through. Or you don’t like it, and you stop anytime you find that it’s just not giving you what you want. After all, it’s not like there’s going to be a test on it.

In the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, I looked up and was...

In the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, I looked up and was astounded by the sight of dazzling white tree like columns soaring into a sunset-pink sky sprinkled with glittering stars. Everything Antonio Gaudi built, he crafted in the image of nature.

Spain Journal

Spain has been in the news a lot lately, because of the unfortunate financial mess it is in. I find myself more sympathetic toward its plight now because I visited Barcelona and Madrid in May (first time in Spain), and I now feel like its destiny is somehow tied to my own. Not to mention that I have friends there who moved from America recently to work in Barcelona for a few years, and I keep thinking of them and how they are dealing with this suddenly ominous financial weather. 

You know how it is sometimes when you visit a place it becomes a part of you forever? Holidays you will never forget, trips you wish you could relive over and over again? Spain was like that for me. It felt good and it felt right from the get go. Funny, because my flight to Barcelona left about four hours late from Kennedy, but I can’t remember the last time (ever!) when waiting in a plane was actually more fun than when it was actually in the air. It helped that we were at the gate (and at one point were allowed to step out to the terminal to get food, etc.) but the crew really made the wait so much fun! Because I was sitting up front, close to the front exit, I got into conversation with the crew members, who were witty, interesting, remarkably friendly (I got a couple of very nice special cocktails) , and extremely helpful (lots of tips about things to do in Barcelona.  Needless to say hanging out with them raised my spirits.

Before I left for Barcelona, my friend warned me that they spoke Catalan there, which was different from Castellano (which is what I knew as Spanish). I had a vague idea that there were some kind of regionalism that made Barcelona believe it was a different country pretty much from the rest of the Spain, but as circumstance would have it, today’s New York Times has a story about Artur Mas, the Catalonian leader, who has been making threatening sounds (apparently with great support from Catalonians) that Catalan would withdraw from Spain, as an independent country. “With a $260 billion economy that is roughly the size of Portugal’s, an independent Catalonia and its 7.5 million inhabitants — 16 percent of Spain’s population — would rank ahead of a dozen of the 27 nations in the European Union.”

I found Barcelona to be enchanting. Again, a lot goes into making a place unforgettable. For me it was dear friends who welcomed me into their home in the city, weather that was just about perfect (in the 60s every day, sunny), streets that were open and vibrant, buildings that were delightfully embellished to the point where you could stand in front of any building anywhere in the city and look for all the little curls and etches and colors and arches that made it unique and different from its neighbors, and seafood that was simply out of this world.

And, it didn’t take long (about two hours after getting into the city proper from the airport) that if there was one name above all that Barcelona revered, it was Antonio Gaudi. (In Turkey, it is Ataturk, in Mumbai it is Shivaji.) It’s all Gaudi, all the time. The quirkily magnificent Sagrada Familia is a testament to Gaudi’s talent in a way that every artist would desire for his or her most stupendous work.

After four days in Barcelona, I traveled on to Madrid where I spent a couple of days, staying on the Gran Via in the heart of downtown, and doing the rounds of the most popular and emblematic hot spots. Madrid has a lot to offer, with immense historical charm, but it didn’t touch my heart the way Barcelona did. Perhaps the city was just a lot more chaotic? Barcelona just floated in the air, a city held aloft by the power of grace, while Madrid seemed rooted and gritty, its stately edifices appearing to wistfully recall better days. Now Madrid (representing Spain) is facing financial ruin, while Barcelona (representing Catalonia) is ready for take off. The ongoing Real Madrid - Barcelona rivalry in soccer seems to have spilled over into the political arena with the threat of much direr consequences. Which is just such a shame.

The Blind Spot - Excerpt

Here’s an excerpt from my novel, “The Blind Spot”, available at Amazon.

“The compartment was nearly empty, yet he chose to remain standing by the door, feeling the rush of wind in his face as the train swayed and clattered past grimy apartment buildings, past smoky factories, past crooked tin shacks, past mountains of garbage, past stations with their ancient Wheeler book and tea stalls, past cricket grounds with bald pitches. He took it all in, the Bombay he loved, every square inch of it.”

Here’s a Wheeler book stall mentioned in the excerpt above. Wheeler book stalls are an institution in Mumbai, one in every train station. Also THE place for a quick tea while waiting for a train.

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Immigrant Rainbow

Just came across a news item that Junot Diaz (who won the Pulitzer prize not too long ago) has been awarded a MacArthur fellowship - a no strings attached grant of half a million dollars. Following is his acceptance video.

http://www.macfound.org/fellows/864/

He focuses on a very particular kind of immigrant experience, revolving around this guy who is from the Dominican Republic, but is an out-and-out New Jersey boy as well. For Diaz, this is the “new immigrant”, not divided but living integrating the two worlds of ancestry and adoption.

Diaz’s new immigrant is born in a working class family and his story is very particular to that mix of Dominican-NJ-blue collar sensibilities. As an immigrant myself, I can relate to the general idea of living in two worlds at once, but the connection sort of weakens there. I am from a middle-class family in India, and live a middle-class life here, and in my novel, “The Blind Spot”, I focus on the experience of someone like me who came to America to go to graduate school, after having been raised in India. The experiences of such a person are remarkable, too, but in a very different way than Diaz’s blue-collar Dominican-NJ integrate. The India-raised American immigrant I believe has to contend with more internal divisions, but material security (from being middle class) can often dampen the creative force that can rise out of such divisions. I have attempted to penetrate the defensive layer worn by the immigrant character, Krishna, in my book, to see what the Indian-American divide has done to his insides.

Other writers of  the immigrant experience come to mind, who are still different. Jhumpa Lahiri (another Pulitzer prize winner) writes about the Indian diaspora in America, with a particular focus on the Bengali community, and the twisted knot of generational issues in immigrant families. In my novel, I explore the conflict that arises out of the immigrant and his child dealing with fragments of the family who are still in India. Kiran Desai (winner of the Man Booker prize) in her novel, “The Inheritance of Loss” writes along a similar theme. While her Indian family is in the hills of the northeast, mine (in The Blind Spot) are in Mumbai, therefore painting a different kind of picture, with an entirely different set of colors.