Raghav Rao's Blog, page 2

[Book Promo] India Events for MISSY in December + SONALI BENDRE!

I’m really pleased to share that later this month, I’ll be doing several events to promote Missy in a few major Indian cities including the Bangalore Literature Festival where I’ll be moderating a panel that includes Booker Prize winning author Kiran Desai as well as Amit Chaudhuri, Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai, and Romesh Gunesekera. Personally, I’m most looking forward to my event at Crosswords Kemps Corner because that the preeminent bookstore from my childhood; I spent countless hours there just standing in front of shelves reading entire books.

Here’s a full calendar of events:

Also, in massive, massive news for all Bollywood fans, Sonali Bendre of ‘90s Bollywood fame, announced yesterday that MISSY will be Book of the Month for her bookclub!

sonalisbookclub A post shared by @sonalisbookclub

I have had some other recent media in case anyone’s interested in a listen. Thank you for continuing to buy and review MISSY. It means the world to me!

Interview on Youtube (57:34) with Pigeonhole, the online, interactive bookclub.

Podcast appearance on The Write and Wrong Podcast

Please Review and Rate MISSY:

If you have read MISSY and enjoyed it, then please leave a review and rating on Goodreads and Amazon. You may think it inconsequential; nothing could be further from the truth. Every review helps me and my agent improve our pitch to US publishers.

The best online retailers for my book are currently Waterstones and Blackwells. If you’re in Chicago, you can get a copy from me directly at a discounted rate. Here’s the India pre-order link.

Thanks for reading The Last Stop on the Late Train! This post is public so feel free to share it.

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A Seminal Assassination In Midtown Manhattan

Yesterday, a man shot Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare outside of the Hilton in midtown Manhattan. I’ve seen the video. The gunman walks up coolly, weapon equipped with a sizable suppressor. The gun jams after each shot fired but the gunman is nonplussed as Thompson reels away from the impact. He clears the chamber and recommences shooting. Later, with inspired street-craft, he rides an ebike from the city’s bikeshare program into Central Park. I venture he had a change of clothes in his backpack. He could have easily hopped over a low wall in Central Park, made his way to a major station, and been out of state within a few hours of the shooting. I suspect he’ll get away even though there will be immense pressure on NYPD to catch him.

Screenshot from the video.

But……don’t expect sympathy or support from the public.

So far, online, from what I’ve seen there is UNILATERAL sympathy for the assassin. No one is uttering the usual platitudes. Think of the wife. Think of the kids. There is no sympathy, only dark humor, only thinly-veiled commentary on how, even if this CEO didn’t necessarily deserve it, he’s not the least deserving murder victim either.

This is because it’s easy for people to understand what might have driven this anonymous gunman to this course of action, to picture the gunman as one of the 100 million Americans with medical debt. Perhaps it drove him to financial ruin, to homelessness. Perhaps he perceives that the insurance industry’s callous denials of coverage cost the life of a loved one. Because he’s a maskless everyman, we are all free to create the backstory of this vigilante, to invent a Jason Bourne.

It’s not like UHC committed a crime and got a light slap on the wrist and this gunman punished them because the regulators failed to. No. The general public feels that the company itself is exploitative. This everyman, people think, was exacting retribution for precisely what the company does legally to enrich its shareholders. UHC has the highest % (32%) of denied claims among major health insurers, a metric that directly correlates to profitability which is what CEOs are measured on. This makes the gunman’s actions look well reasoned, logical. You can even say ‘just’ according to a brutal vision of justice, not a legal one, but still an understandable one.

I can imagine a media counter-narrative, asking how Brian Thompson, a hardworking innocent man, can be so dehumanized? Are the American people so callous, so bloodthirsty that they now support vigilante killings?

Firstly, people are de-humanized in a number of ways. One way is downward; when a person experiences homelessness, they are often dehumanized by passersby who are inured or form baseless value judgments. But people can also dehumanize people ‘up’, too, and when CEOs, make 200 times the median wage of their own workers, they also lose their humanity in people's eyes. We shouldn't have have any pearl clutching about this. Inequality will create dehumanization.

The counter-narrative will likely continue. It might say: This wasn’t even a vigilante killing! Brian Thompson committed no crime, they will say!

But people have been paying premiums. And these companies have been denying them coverage! Literally denying them what they have paid for. Isn’t that a crime? Even if the courts don’t deem it so? And this man, along with other leaders in his industry, led the strategy behind that crime, even if it has legal imprimatur.

Don’t believe me? This is from ProPublica: Refusing payment for medical care and drugs has become a staple of their business model, in part because they know customers appeal less than 1% of denials, said Wendell Potter, who oversaw Cigna’s communications team for more than a decade before leaving the industry in 2008 to become a consumer advocate.

So it’s part of the health insurance business model and this man was responsible for the business model. I myself have experienced blood-boiling anger talking with medical providers who have had to waste precious time in review with insurance companies, dickering with pencil-pushing claims deniers on why the so-called unnecessary medicines or procedures were in fact necessary!

Everything I’m saying is in the Zeitgeist. People are not fussed about this murder. And that’s because everyone, almost, in America, Democrats and Republicans, want universal healthcare. But because of special interest capture, Dems have repeatedly refused to play this winning hand. (I can’t get into that here but it’s maddening).

Even if tomorrow we find out that the gunman was involved in a love triangle with Brian Thompson, I still think my point will stand. So long as this culprit remains at large, remains a mystery, we can all understand WHY someone might take this drastic action. More than that, it represents wish fulfillment, fantasy enactment, and a sense of whole-making justice, even if it is of an old-fashioned kind. He did it gracefully, too, skillfully, like Jason Bourne, which itself is empowering for the 100M Americans who have seen the healthcare industry strip away their dignity, their capacity for self-empowerment. He will remain a hero to many. I’m certain of it. No matter what we learn about him or what is said about him later.

I don't know what the legacy of this moment will be. But it is definitely a moment and it's something to pay attention to.

PS: A little bit later this morning, I also have a book promotion post going out. It will be incongruous with this one. But that’s marketing, I guess.

Please Review and Rate MISSY:

If you have read MISSY and enjoyed it, then please leave a review and rating on Goodreads and Amazon. You may think it inconsequential; nothing could be further from the truth. Every review helps me and my agent improve our pitch to US publishers.

The best online retailers for my book are currently Waterstones and Blackwells. If you’re in Chicago, you can get a copy from me directly at a discounted rate. Here’s the India pre-order link.

Thanks for reading The Last Stop on the Late Train! This post is public so feel free to share it.

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Why can't I stop clicking articles about whales?

This is a newsletter primarily about exercising discernment in a media-saturated world. I urge readers to not let devices control their attention. But I need to come clean. Sometimes, when I open Chrome on my phone or other device, its algorithm feeds me articles about whales, and I can’t help myself, before I know it I’ve clicked.

Here’s a smattering of whale articles that I’ve clicked in the last six months:

Oct 29 -Where have all the sperm whales gone? Scientists think they know / Earth.com

Sep 28 - Drone footage reveals orcas hunting unexpected prey off Chile for first time | The Independent

September 6 -"Russian spy" beluga whale that was found dead "had multiple bullet wounds," animal rights group says / CBS News

August 3 - A humpback whale in Washington state is missing its tail. / AP News

July 15 - Creature that washed up on New Zealand beach may be world's rarest whale — a spade-toothed whale / CBS News

July 12 - The sperm whale 'phonetic alphabet' revealed by AI / BBC News May 10 - Visited Cruise ship drags dead whale into New York / WaPo

Why? I’m not a cetologist! I like animals but I wouldn’t put myself in the top 25% of animal lovers. I do like whales. They are magnificent with enormous brains and evoke mystical wonder. But still, why when I see an article about whales, must I click it? The interesting moment precedes the click. I don’t ask myself, ‘Why am I clicking this?”

It’s instant. I click. Then, I may think, “Why did I just do that?”

But cognition arrives late.

Krishnamurti, I believe, was right; thought is overrated. We think we have control over our emotional responses. Our prefrontal cortex would like that to be true. I’d go a step further, our collective belief in cognition, in our ability to reason our way through the world, is dangerous because it’s incongruent with reality.

If you aren’t familiar with my relationship with the ideas of J.Krishnamurti — read this.

I’m not saying that it’s wrong to give in to impulse on occasion and read a clickbait-y article from Earth.com entitled: AI helps humans have a 20-minute 'conversation' with a humpback whale named Twain. (SPOILER: Researchers sent a recorded humpback “contact” call into the ocean using an underground speaker. A humpback approached their boat and responded matching the intervals of the call). No meaningful dialogue was had.

But back to my point re: the limits of cognition vs. the Internet and News media.

The amygdala is part of the visceral brain stem. It is important for emotional regulation. Critically, it is part of the limbic system and therefore it is difficult to control it with cognition. You can use cognition to some extent but it requires a lot of training. It responds better to physiological control — controlled breathing, cold exposure.

Since I’ve been clicking whale articles, I’m fed more of them, naturally. It’s a burden to my impulse control to resist their song. I’m not going to splash my face with water every time Chrome throws up a whale link.

Impulse control is governed by the amygdala.

No matter how strong of a thinker you believe yourself to be, the amygdala is operating below the level of cognition. The algorithms and the news media are targeting the amygdala. It’s not an admission of weakness to say that we have limited control in our response to stimuli. It’s fact.

We have to try (and I do try!) to limit the stimuli because managing our response to them is very hard.

There’s a lot more to say on this subject. In fact, I intend to write a piece (with appropriate distance) on elections as battles between the amygdala and the pre-frontal cortex but I’ll stop there for now. I’m waging a long war on cognition. For too long, I’ve reified it. This is just one salvo in that long war.

Please Review and Rate MISSY:

If you have read MISSY and enjoyed it, then please leave a review and rating on Goodreads and Amazon. You may think it inconsequential; nothing could be further from the truth. Every review helps me and my agent improve our pitch to US publishers.

The best online retailers for my book are currently Waterstones and Blackwells. If you’re in Chicago, you can get a copy from me directly at a discounted rate. Here’s the India pre-order link.

Thanks for reading The Last Stop on the Late Train! This post is public so feel free to share it.

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My Bookshelf - Reader’s Digest

The Dopamine Cookie Tin:

Before I get into the main content of this newsletter (brief blurbs on 10 of my favorite books), I want to document a personal failure. This is a newsletter primarily about exercising discernment in our information-saturated age. I must admit that I failed at proactively managing my information diet in the lead-up to the election. I was unhealthily addicted to reading the polls like tea leaves. I found myself greedily reaching into the dopamine cookie tin — the Internet — to “stay informed” but pretty soon, I was back to watching mind-numbing Youtube videos of deranged street interviews while queuing up true crime podcasts while playing chess. I exaggerate of course but the point is stimulation seeking leads to more stimulation seeking. Now, I’m trying to put the dopamine cookie tin on a higher shelf. I know what I need to do in my communities, in my personal and professional life. Very little has changed in that regard. First, I must slow down. An excellent way to slow down is in the company of a good book.

Reader’s Digest - Me & My Shelf

I loved Reader’s Digest as a kid; I remember tattered copies were frequently passed around in the dorms in Rishi Valley and we’d lie on our beds during “rest hour” (the hour after lunch) and read aloud their clean yet quaintly funny jokes. I particularly loved their true stories submitted by readers. Reader’s Digest and the Chicken Soup series were perennial favorites amongst us. So was MAD magazine and Tinkle, to be perfectly honest. We were gluttons for anything. Now, I’m honored to be featured in the print issue of Reader’s Digest (India).

Just came out in the Nov 2024 issue of Reader’s Digest (India)

The story is ‘Me & My Shelf’ and it’s basically ten books that I can’t live without / have influenced me / that I recommend to everyone. It was a pleasure to compile this list and I’ve shared it in full below. If you’re in India, please go outside and buy a Reader’s Digest copy and support that venerable institution.

My Shelf:

The Collected Short Stories of Roald Dahl - Roald Dahl

There’s few things we love more than a twist and Dahl, known for his quirky, dark children’s fiction, is an exceptional crafter of a nasty twist. Spare, artfully constructed, and often cruelly funny, many of its stories are unforgettable guilty pleasures.

The Barn Owl’s Wondrous Capers - Sarnath Banerjee

This graphic novel occupies a shelf in my heart because, with school friends, I adapted and staged it as a play. Adapting a text allows for deeper intimacy; my copy is annotated to tatters; apocryphal moments, “the dark armpits of history” are illuminated; this Kolkata story is for all urbanites; how we drink our cities in vignettes like cups of chai.

Beloved - Toni Morrison

Growing up in India, I read mostly Indian and British authors but Toni Morrison captures the central fissure running through America, the painful, enduring, tormented legacy of the enslavement of countless people of African descent. A heartbreaking book whose lines float off the page.

The Snow Leopard - Peter Mathiessen

Journeys, like books, present an external conflict but are always about an internal conflict. Not long after losing his wife, the author embarked on a two-month journey in Tibet as part of an expedition to film the elusive snow leopard but of course, as you’ve probably guessed, it’s about more than that.

The Simoqin Prophecies by Samit Basu

The fantasy genre is replete with binaries but there’s nothing simple about this witty, gag-filled, spoofy fantasy. Twenty years after its original publication, it has lost none of its zip. In fact, its twists, values, flips and flops, are more glorious. If you haven’t, you must read about these asurs, pashans, vanars, and manticores!

A River Runs Through It - Norman Maclean

A novella, written late in life, by a longtime professor of English, is a story of two brothers who grew up fly-fishing in Montana. It’s an important reminder that, while, yes, representation certainly matters, words, artfully arranged, can bring meaning to anyone, even a young boy in India in a hot room under a non-functioning fan.

Born for Love by Dr. Bruce Perry & Maia Szalavitz

It’s not often that you can say a book changed your life; here, a renowned child psychiatrist and a journalist together examine the long-term effects of loving or withholding love from children. For me, it reframed our purpose on the planet and how best to allocate our time.

The Remembrance of Earth’s Past (Trilogy)- Cixin Liu

This series imagines Earth’s response to encountering an alien civilization with such magnificent scope that only a great mind could even attempt such a thing. The result, for me, was a story that made me feel like a kid again, reading under the sheets with a torch until the batteries ran out. Whenever an outsider approaches, more than them, it’s the people around us that we learn about!

The Legends of Khasak - O.V. Vijayan

Lyrical, suffused with syncretic magic that is wholly Indian, Khasakkinte ittihasam is dripping poetry in English, how good must it be in Malayalam? Uniquely, the book has been translated by the author himself; I’ll take this book over any of its contemporaries, the great Latin American works of magical realism.

The Karla Trilogy by John Le Carré

These three exceptional novels, published collectively as an omnibus, are the work of the master of the spy novel at the height of his powers; beyond the high-stakes games of nation states, inside each one of us, is an inner war. We fight ourselves as much as our enemies; I open it weekly and each time learn a new lesson.

Please Review and Rate MISSY:

If you have read MISSY and enjoyed it, then please leave a review and rating on Goodreads and Amazon. You may think it inconsequential; nothing could be further from the truth. Every review helps me and my agent improve our pitch to US publishers.

The best online retailers for my book are currently Waterstones and Blackwells. If you’re in Chicago, you can get a copy from me directly at a discounted rate. Here’s the India pre-order link.

Thanks for reading The Last Stop on the Late Train! This post is public so feel free to share it.

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For My New York-Based Readers

If you’re in New York this coming Saturday, please consider attending my event at the International House in Morningside Heights. I’ll be discussing Missy in conversation with Professor Makarand Paranjape. It’s a joint discussion that features another debut author, Nishanth Injam, who is a lovely person and a deep thinker. I was moved by his collection of short stories, The Best Possible Experience. He has limpid, precise prose and there is a depth of feeling, often grief and longing, in each of his stories.

Literary Festival 2024 | Saturday, November 9 | 3:00 - 3:50 PM

This event is part of the Indo-American Arts Council’s 2024 Literary Festival. It is free to attend.

Event Details:

Date: Saturday, November 9

Time: 3:00 - 3:50 pm EST

Location: International House, 500 Riverside Drive, New York, NY 10027

Worth repeating. It’s free to attend. RSVP here in case the room fills - Link

Hope to see some familiar faces and meet new ones!

Also, don’t just come for me! Harini Nagendra, author of the Bangalore Detective Club Series is speaking, too. My kickass agent Priya Doraswamy is on an industry panel with an accomplished editor.

Please Review and Rate MISSY:

If you have read MISSY and enjoyed it, then please leave a review and rating on Goodreads and Amazon. You may think it inconsequential; nothing could be further from the truth. Every review helps me and my agent improve our pitch to US publishers.

The best online retailers for my book are currently Waterstones and Blackwells. If you’re in Chicago, you can get a copy from me directly at a discounted rate. Here’s the India pre-order link.

Thanks for reading The Last Stop on the Late Train! This post is public so feel free to share it.

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A changing of seasons

Autumn’s arrival

For me that feeling of fall begins with the shortening of days, followed by the cooling weather. I’m pulled into coziness. I add more layers to the bed: a thick blanket and eventually exchange the summer quilt for the winter duvet. Ceiling fans are turned off, windows closed inch by inch, and heat turned on. I wear socks again to work and to bed. I wear my favorite fuzzy pair and it is one of the moments I relish most in this seasonal transition.

I am watching a lot of movies to pass the time. Over the last couple weeks I’ve watched Midsommar, Psycho, The Birds, and every movie from the Scream franchise (such a fun throwback). I have been especially captivated by Midsommar. There are many movies that use trauma-driven plots, although none to such nuanced and exacting realism and impact as Midsommar. I experienced a range of uncomfortable and disquieting emotions, not unlike what I experience in my work as a trauma therapist. The film felt familiar. It captured the incredible complexity of the presentations of trauma at the individual level and how that interacts with a community built on trauma and darkness.

Captivated by Midsommar

I missed Midsommar when it first came out in 2019. It is directed by Ari Aster who directed Hereditary, which is next on my list to watch. After watching Midsommar on HBO Max, I then watched a stunning 7-hour film analysis of it on YouTube. The analysis indisputably showed how the artistry of the film and its psychological narratives are inseparable.

Midsommar opens on a frigid winter cityscape. Dimness and remoteness characterize the indoor scenes as the protagonist’s life is shattered in the first ten minutes. The film quickly jumps seasons to summer and a cast of characters traveling to Sweden. The brightness and color of the shots are filtered, rendering surreal the sky and open landscape. That sense of remoteness persists as they make their way to an isolated community. The midnight sun of summertime adds to the surreal quality.

I was enthralled by the psychological journey of the protagonist, Dani, played by Florence Pugh. She suffers the horrific loss of her family in the bitter winter and is in a dissociated haze in the many months that follow. Her partner is a dud, a non-committal guy indifferent to the traumatic emotional wounding she has experienced. He is half out of the relationship. When they arrive to the commune of the Hårga, the threads of Dani’s trauma and grief become intertwined with the sinister dynamics of the cult.

The film exquisitely grasps the elements of trauma. Dani is intensely wounded and vulnerable. Her emotional dependence on the middling boyfriend is painful to witness. The indifference of her friends (if you could call them that) towards her well-being is mirrored by the cult’s. There is trauma reenactment in the bystander effect as no one intervenes — no one has ever properly intervened in Dani’s life. However, to be in the lair of the cult is to be in a house of mirrors. Their alternating indifference and predation are distorted in the reflective surface and present as compassionate community and emotional holding. There is a vivid scene where Dani’s grotesque and out-of-control grief is literally mirrored by the group of Hårga women who collectively kneel in front of her, faces similarly contorted, and scream in pain in mimic of hers. It is chilling.

As in any horror movie, there a general idea of what is to come. The sun never sets, yet that does not stop people from meeting quite gruesome ends. The wide shots of verdant forest, flowering fields, open sky, and blue-grey, craggy cliffs evoke the sublime and contribute to a sense of disorientation and dread. Ari Aster proceeds to take every possible narrative thread to its terrible end as explained in the YouTube video linked above. Any logistical and societal issue that an isolated and remote cult may bump up against is addressed.

Midsommar conjures that quality of hyper-realness and disorientation of trauma. Aural and visual perceptions are sharply juxtaposed, furthering confusion. Time is sped up and slowed. There is a feeling of being without or outside of time. There is hyper-vigilance and not knowing where the danger will come from. The film moves into an blood-thirsty and satisfying ending as Dani experiences frightful catharsis. The viewer wonders what will happen to her now that she is bound to a group that will ultimately annihilate her.

Thanks for reading The Last Stop on the Late Train! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Please Review and Rate MISSY:

MISSY (India) | Missy (UK)

If you have read MISSY and enjoyed it, then please leave a review and rating on Goodreads and Amazon.

The best online retailers for are currently Waterstones and Blackwells. If you’re in Chicago, you can get a copy from Raghav directly at a discounted rate.

Records Broken - CAF & Homelessness

Two things were reported but not sufficiently connected in roughly the last month:

In America, the amount of Civil Forfeiture exceeded all civilian theft and burglary combined. (Source)

Homelessness is projected to be at its all-time-high in 2024 with more than 650k people in America living unhoused. (Source)

In my own city of Chicago, doing hard, thankless, high-quality work was Chicago Appleseed Center for Fair Courts who put together a report called ‘I Don’t Know Why I Am Here - Observations from Chicago’s Civil Asset Forfeiture Courtrooms.’ - LINK.

So Grateful For These Organizations And The Work They Do

My American readers have no doubt received their ballots and looked at the list of judges and speculated on what their day-to-day looks like. Please skim through the report. You will learn how judges contend with suffering, confused people. These aren’t criminals. These are regular people pushing their way through a tangle of towing fees, storage fees, and obscure, punitive ordinances. Let me remind you, this is not criminal forfeiture that takes place after a conviction. This doesn’t require convictions or even charges. This is the government taking ownership of private citizen’s property if that person has been suspected of a crime.

When we as a society allow law enforcement to keep the proceeds of this type of asset forfeiture, we are incentivizing them to go out and “scout” for vehicles and assets to bolster their own budget. There’s a perverse incentive and we’re naive if we think it will not be abused.

Laws written to recover the assets of kingpins like John Gotti are used to take vehicles away from people struggling to make a living.

In America, with its car-centric infrastructure, taking a car from someone is like taking their pants and expecting them to go to work. It’s infuriating, it’s wrong. Take their car and you have fast-tracked them to losing housing.

There’s a lot of hand-wringing and talks of constitutionality and due process. In the May 2024 Supreme court ruling on CAF, Kavanaugh wrote: “The Constitution requires a timely forfeiture hearing; the Constitution does not also require a separate preliminary hearing.”

Whatever, mate. He, and, a lot of us, frankly don’t want to see what’s plainly there.

Law enforcement, facilitated by legislators and by extension, us, steals more from Americans than burglars and robbers. More people on the brink will not be able to go to work, to make mortgage and rent payments, to fight against foreclosure and eviction, and will end up as people experiencing homelessness where they will then be perceived as having “failed” rather than as having been sinned against.

I’m not a lawyer; I’m not a data scientist. But I know that 1) & 2) are related. I know that we are punishing people for poverty, not for criminality, and that is wrong.

Please Review and Rate MISSY:

When will I stop asking my readers to help me out? Probably never.

The algorithm is a fickle master. Even if you just click the following links, without buying anything, even if you’re from a different country, it helps the overall algorithm.

MISSY (India) | Missy (UK)

If you have read MISSY and enjoyed it, then please leave a review and rating on Goodreads and Amazon. You may think it inconsequential; nothing could be further from the truth. Every review helps me and my agent improve our pitch to US publishers.

The best online retailers for my book are currently Waterstones and Blackwells. If you’re in Chicago, you can get a copy from me directly at a discounted rate. Here’s the India pre-order link.

Thanks for reading The Last Stop on the Late Train! This post is public so feel free to share it.

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Callbacks in The Wire & Shakespeare - Chiasmus & Antimetabole

A core lesson for me, in my writing practice and in my study of superior story-crafters, is that the micro scale mirrors the macro.

You no doubt recognize the following:

Fair is foul and foul is fair. (Macbeth)

"Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” (Kennedy’s inaugural address)

“Ask not what country is foul for you, ask what you can fairly foul up for your country!” - William F. Kennedy

These are examples of antimetabole which is the repetition of words in successive clauses, but in transposed order. You don’t need to know this word to intuitively feel its rhetorical effectiveness.

Why? Why does transposition create trust/credibility/the solid ring of truth?

I think we like patterns because they confer structure and sense on the world. The joy of narrative art is often in seeing a master craftsman draw elements from the real world (which is wanton and random) and impose order and make its parts sing.

But Shakespeare didn’t just do Antimetabole & Chiasmus (the repetition of structures without necessarily the repetition of the words themselves); he did situational callbacks. So creating parallel, repeating scenes that echo each other.

So, for example, Portia pleading with Brutus mirrors Calpurnia pleading with Caesar; that’s a form of conceptual Chiasmus.

We see this all the time in narrative art. The Wire does it best, in my opinion, using it to draw parallels across institutions so that a morning briefing in the Western Police district is made to mirror the tedium/horror of a staff meeting at a public school.

Good writers do it all the time on the sentence level, on the scene level, AND on the theme level — hence making all the parts refer to each other — and creating a fractal-like structure.

Shakespeare sometimes does all at once!

For example, in the opening scene of Julius Caesar, the “mob”, the regular people of Rome are out and about in the streets to celebrate Caesar and a tribune criticizes them. He says, You blocks, you stones, you worse than senseless things!

Then, quite a bit later, Marc Antony, addressing a similar mob gathered around Caesar’s body, says to them. You are not wood, you are not stones, but men!

There’s an inverted callback here; and not only does it invoke the earlier language, it has a narrative and thematic consequence.

Narratively, in the opening scene, the Tribunes who chastise the rabble are underrating their power for insurrection. Marc Antony inflames them using the inversion. This drives the plot forward; it also has a larger thematic contribution to the play, pointing to the power of everyday, working citizens, something that must have played nicely to the Elizabethan crowd in the yard.

The Wire has many callbacks, skillfully crafted across its many seasons. For example, in Season 4, a cop begins her work in the Homicide department. A veteran investigator tells her that she needs “soft eyes”, saying, "You got soft eyes, you can see the whole picture. You got hard eyes, you’re staring at the same tree, missing the forest.”

This is echoed by a veteran teacher at the Edward Tilghman Public School who tells a new teacher that it helps to have “soft eyes.”

Now, on one level, this is a pure callback. On another, it draws institutional parallels. But on yet another, it is the show’s creators instructing us how to view the show.

As I hammer home to students (and a few write it down) — great art instructs us on how to read it.

All this to say is that what happens on the micro level, the word and sentence, if that is mirrored on subsequent levels, it creates a fractal feeling of connectedness that is satisfying and effective.

Please Review and Rate MISSY:

When will I stop asking my readers to help me out? Probably never.

The algorithm is a fickle master. Even if you just click the following links, without buying anything, even if you’re from a different country, it helps the overall algorithm.

MISSY (India) | Missy (UK)

If you have read MISSY and enjoyed it, then please leave a review and rating on Goodreads and Amazon. You may think it inconsequential; nothing could be further from the truth. Every review helps me and my agent improve our pitch to US publishers.

The best online retailers for my book are currently Waterstones and Blackwells. If you’re in Chicago, you can get a copy from me directly at a discounted rate. Here’s the India pre-order link.

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Contradiction: The Underlying Pleasure of Literature

I want to keep today’s post simple even though it merits more.

This is a newsletter about exercising discernment in a media-saturated world. I’ve found that the ideas of J. Krishnamurti, though abstract, hold up very well in dealing with this post(?)-Internet world where words and images proliferate, terabytes and petabytes, all of it doing god-knows-what to the collective future of our species.

I want to present one Krishnamurti quote and one excerpt from Janet Burroway’s seminal book, “Writing Fiction.” My hope is that by putting them together, we see that though self-deception is inevitable, it can have value.

First, the Krishnamurti quote:

The root of contradiction is the division between the thinker and the thought. The word is never the thing. The word is not action.

Then, the Burroway excerpt:

Every reader is a self-deceiver: We simultaneously “believe” a story and know that it is a fabrication. Our belief in the reality of the story may be so strong that it produces physical reactions — tears, trembling, sighs, gasps, a headache. At the same time, as long as the fiction is working for us, we know that our submission is voluntary, that we have, as Samuel Taylor Coleridge pointed out, suspended disbelief.

Simultaneous belief and awareness of illusion are present in both the content and craft of literature and what is properly called artistic pleasure derives from the tension of this is and is not. The content of a plot, for instance, tells us that something happens that does not happen, that people who do not exist behave in such a way, and that the events of life — which we know to be random, unrelated, and unfinished — are necessary, patterned, and come to closure. Pleasure in artistry comes precisely when the illusion rings true without destroying the knowledge that it is an illusion.

We take pleasure in self-deception. In fact, that is the pleasure of literature.

Let me leave you with this: we cannot trust our own thoughts because there, the self-deception is presented as truth. But we can trust literature precisely because we know it to be a fabrication.

Is that a contradiction? Probably. That’s how you know you can trust it.

MISSY Information:

The best online retailers for my book are currently Waterstones and Blackwells. If you’re in Chicago, you can get a copy from me directly at a discounted rate. Here’s the India pre-order link.

Thank you for ordering my book. Please do rate and review it on Goodreads and/or Amazon.

Thanks for reading The Last Stop on the Late Train! This post is public so feel free to share it.

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The Never-Realized Fugu Plan

When I lived in New York, if my day brought me within a short walk of Union Square, I always made time to browse the shelves outside the Strand Bookstore where books are sold for $1, $2, and $3. I read eclectically, employing selectivity verging on randomness.

Recently, passing through the city, I went in search of such finds and bought the following book, The Fugu Plan. It promised the untold story of Japan’s strange plan for Europe’s Jews during World War Two. Soon after an unusual buyer’s remorse came over me for I felt that, I’d sufficiently digested its message reading on the sidewalk. I didn’t need it now; I would never remember the bureaucratic minutiae of how the Fugu plan did not come to pass. All I would remember was that at one point during the Second World War Imperial Japan had thought to import the same Jews that Europe was looking to murder. Oh, and, one other thing — I’d never forget the moral courage of Chiune Sugihara.

For all of you, so you do not need to read this book and yet so that you have the Sparknotes version of this strange historical quirk, I have penned this post. Here are the biggest, most memorable bits of the so-called, and ultimately abandoned Fugu plan, rehousing Jews in cold and forbidding Manchuria.

Fugu Plan

The Whole Thing Was Based On Anti-Semitism

You have no doubt heard of the notorious fabricated text, ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ that alleges that the ‘global Jewry’ controls the world through finance, the press, and by subverting the morals of non-jews. This was fabricated in the early 20th century in Russia; as it so happens, this text was stumbled upon by some members of the Japanese Imperial Army who served in its Kwantung Army in charge of security of the railway in the Manchuria area after the Russo-Japanese War. Instead of appalled, they were mightily impressed by the global reach of the Jews and thought, ‘Hey — if we can get tied in with these fellows who control the world’s finances, then maybe we can improve Japan’s relationship with those famed wealthy Jews in America.’ Then in 1931, after Japan invaded Manchuria, this changed to ‘perhaps we can get their knowledge of finance to help us develop our newly acquired territory’.

The Plan Never Reached Its Peak

The ‘plan’, if it can be called that, was really just a series of meetings at a few levels of the imperial army and imperial government and with Jewish community leaders of the city of Harbin, a city in Northeast China. The idea was to resettle European jews in communities and give them religious freedom and other freedoms. But simultaneously, fearing their influence, to inoculate them from mainstream Japan. At its zenith, the plan probably proposed the resettlement of 50,000 - 60,000 Jews. But, it failed in part because the Japanese authorities failed to investigate the kidnapping and murder of the son of a prominent Jewish business leader in Harbin. The crime was reportedly committed by Russian nationalists, so-called ‘White Russians’ who the Japanese authorities were trying to court.

Why did the plan, if such a plan existed, fail to materialize?

This one’s easy. In 1940, Japan signed the Tripartite Pact and this meant that they could no longer be seen as offering help to Jews as this would deeply displease their German allies.

So they didn’t help anyone?

One man did. Or rather two men. Very often moral rectitude comes from the few willing to do the right thing. In Lithuania, Jan Zwartendijk, who was really a businessman but was acting as Dutch consul, took an extraordinary step. He printed on the passport of a Dutch Jew, Nathan Gutwith, who was in Lithuania studying at Telz Yeshiva, a simple statement of fact; it merely stated the words: Curaçao does not not require a visa.

That was it. Just a statement of fact. This was not a visa. Not an exit visa. Nor was it even permission to enter Curacao; you’d need its governor’s permission for that. But this sleight of hand required a second step. Enter Chiune Sugihara. When Gutwith showed up at the Japanese consulate, Chiune granted him a transit visa through Japan and then cabled Tokyo for further instruction, not realizing that the floodgates were open. Word spread amongst the Lithuanian Jews and soon hundreds and then thousands came. Tokyo issued orders forbidding Sugihara to issue more visas but in a conspicuous act of moral courage, recognizing the danger these people were in, Sugihara hand-wrote visas, spending 18-20 hours a day producing a month’s worth each day, every day until he had to leave his post because the consulate was closing. No one knows the real number, but he granted thousands of visas, many of which went to heads of households and thus permitted them to take their families, too. It is reported that the number of people descended from the people saved by Sugihara may be as many as 100,000.

For their actions, Chiune Sugihara and Jan Zwartendijk were recognized by Yad Vashed as Righteous Among the Nations.

The Fugu Plan itself never materialized, if it ever really existed. But these two men together saved thousands. Perhaps there’s a lesson here. There’s always a temptation in grand designs, real or imagined. But sometimes it’s the paper in front of you that matters. I will leave you with these moving paragraphs (courtesy of Wikipedia):

Sugihara was still writing visas while in transit from his hotel and after boarding the train at Kaunas railway station, throwing visas into the crowd of desperate refugees out of the train's window even as the train pulled out. In final desperation, blank sheets of paper with only the consulate seal and his signature (that could be later written over into a visa) were hurriedly prepared and flung out from the train. As he prepared to depart, he said, "Please forgive me. I cannot write anymore. I wish you the best.”

MISSY Information:

The best online retailers for my book are currently Waterstones and Blackwells. If you’re in Chicago, you can get a copy from me directly at a discounted rate. Here’s the India pre-order link.

Thank you for ordering my book. Please do rate and review it on Goodreads and/or Amazon.

Thanks for reading The Last Stop on the Late Train! This post is public so feel free to share it.

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