How does one write a book review when one has forgotten the good first half of the book ? I hadn't been reading seriously for all of 2018, and then yesterday, in a desperate attempt to get back to shape intellectually, I downloaded a habit building app, and put in 30 minutes of reading slots everyday. It worked (and it always works for me - these habit building apps, that is), and I blizzarded through the last 150 pages history of mankind in Yuval Harari's "Homo Sapiens".
The book's really popular, has great ratings on Goodreads, and comes recommended from Bill Gates himself. Equally true to that superstar status - is that book is kind of lame and bland. It is my conspiracy theory that Bill Gates, in an effort to nudge us to read more books, adds a lot of dumb and easy to read books in his book recommendations, much like mothers world over discreetly add veggies to children's food. Look, eating vegetable is good for you, even if Nestle tries to tell you that Maggi veg noodles is actually both vegetable and good, just as Bill Gates probably thinks reading is good for less-smarter people like us, even if it's sort of Chetan Bhagat types, it's still a book. Everyone has a paternalistic agenda, these days !
The book is essentially what I call the "summary types" - which would basically is a lot of Wikipedia, made into small capsules of trivia, written well into a a lot of trivia compiled into one smooth flowing book. Though there has been some criticism about how the author actually believed that the agricultural revolution wasn't a good, I honestly don't recall that part of the book. However, I remember Harari mentioning that since there was an entire travel industry, supported by improvement in our public transport system, waiting to flourish, the narrative that travel was a way to enlightenment came about. So let's be clear - no one really said that travel wasn't good, when we didn't have steam engines. While it is true that the entire instagram-facebook jungle promotes a view that staying in a good hotel, and travelling around the globe (while slogging in a boring soul-less job, which life is not shared on social media) is a great noble quality in one, it rarely isn't the kind of travel that leads to an experience, as opposed to a pleasant memory.
The last chapter of the book culminates into one large question what makes one happy.By then, I had lost it. Almost, when I lost it here, on this article.
At
that point, till 'Lean In' happened, it didn't matter how often and how
bored I felt, by the constant repetitions and lack of substantive
content in these book, what remained constant was that I simply couldn't
get myself to wrap up reading on grounds that the books weren't good
enough. Instead, I always ended up thinking that it was me who wasn't
good enough. Think of it, this way - if I were a serious reader,
wouldn't I be able to finish a book cover to cover, even if I found them
mediocre ? Would I ever be taken seriously by serious readers if I ever
disclosed to them that I cannot often read certain type of books, end
to end ? Every time I would reach a stage when I knew the books would
have gone repetitive, I would keep them by my bedside, and keep reading,
every now and then flipping to the end page to see how far I was from
the end - because if I didn't finish reading till the last word, someone
would see me or I would get caught in a conversation somewhere on the
planet, and wouldn't be taken seriously. There was this fear - a
constant fear - and quite crippling at times, to sift through a book I
had clearly considered mediocre or unworthy, just for the fear of being
exposed.
It
seems what I felt was the 'imposter syndrone' about which I might have
heard earlier may be, but basically got around to knowing that it was a
real thing, especially one which women suffer from quite a bit. It isn't
a fancy thing - just one where one feels inferior and absolutely
incapable of internalizing achievement and constantly lives under fear
of being "outed" as a fraud. Sandberg drives home a point that women
suffer more from Imposter Syndrome, than men do and cites an example
from her life where her brothers were always more confident than she
was. It wasn't until my younger brother almost laughed off at me for
reading Bus-Pop end to end, that I realized between a white Jewish woman
living in America and an Indian brown women living in India - there
wasn't much of a gender construct difference, for, we both had brothers
that did have more confidence than we did. My brother, almost
non-nonchalantly mentioned to me, that it wasn't ever necessary to
really read Bus-Pop with much seriousness, and that if one skimmed
through the book and heard the author's interview or talk on Google or
Ted, it was just about enough. Since
then, and much later, I read Virginia Woolf's "A room on one's own',
where Woolf mentions says if Shakespeare had a sister, an imaginary
Judith Shakespeare, who was brought up differently from William
Shakespeare - say, she was told she could not write poetry because women
are not good poets, or that she could not be good at mathematics
because women are not good at STEM - would she write in the manner that
male William Shakespeare did and be as successful as William was ? Most
probably not. In the worlds of William and Judith, Sheryl and her
brothers, and me and my brother - it was the same story everywhere - the
lack of access of knowledge, and even the courage and ease to pursue
it, gets so truncated and difficult and often, impossible, if you are a
woman. Woolf
in her book mentions how hundreds of men have written about women, and
on women, and as woman, as their lead characters, but so few women have
been able to write about themselves. Years
and years, it angered me. When I was told my men I had dated, that
they found me intellectually stimulating for my knowledge of humanities,
but "aggressive" when I refused to be part of a patriarchal rituals
like Rakhi Bandhan or Bhai Duuj (which are Indian gendered festivals
where women celebrate and pray for the long lives of their male
siblings, and not vice versa). The fact that I could not think and
choose my own identity - from gender to religion - was allowed only in
theory, but not in practice. My parents have often told that I was more
aggressive than my brother in my refusal to follow social norms -
because even refusal to participate in any social norm that was clearly
inequal or patriarchal must be done with politeness. Understanding
my anger as a woman was easy, because I was a woman, and clearly a
minority in most gender equations. My anger, legitimate, as also the
anger of women, of colour or religion, different from mine, also equally
legitimate, was a narrative I could relate to. That was a happy space,
in my late twenties, when I had come to make peace with my anger, and
felt no shame in my behaviour, but early thirties, brought in another
dimension - what about anger of a group, who was alien to me, and in
which matrix, where I was a majoritarian privileged group. When I first read Ahmbedkar's 'Annihilation of Caste' and compared it to everything I had read by Nehru and Gandhi after this realization, I was able to rationalise Ahmedkar's 'angry' style of writing for the first time, as opposed to the much smoother style of style by more privileged Nehru and Gandhi.I had almost discarded once in my late teens dalit author Kancha Illiah's 'Why I am not a Hindu' as a book without merit, and now, after a decade, I realised that I was the William Shakespeare, and he was the Judith in this case. Then, the peace I had felt, from the finding my voice in Judith, was replaced by the guilt I felt upon my discovery that I have been ignoring many Judiths all my life.
I discovered Subway circa 2003, in a store inside Brigade Mall on Brigade Road, Bangalore, a city where I had moved in from Calcutta to finish my graduation. My first order was placed with the help of a friend, who walked me through the various options of bread, sauce and vegetables, which I was completely unaware of and I was worried if all that was worth the effort, since the Sub came for the same price as a sumptuous plate of Chicken Biriyani from nearby iconic Meghna Biriyani. Even then, Subway was expensive for the amount of food it served to large-portion eaters, and continues to be almost equally priced now, that means a non-veg Sub costs as much as a plate of Chicken Biriyani.
For me, growing up in middle class Calcutta in a socially upwardly
mobile family of Bangladeshi Post Partition refugee background, to
moving to Bangalore to study, Subway was more like a rite of passage to
a more elitist world - one needed to know what a Jalapeno was, and not
pronounce it the way it is written - that is, Halapeno and not Jalepeno. And then know, everything from Parmesan Oregano to Honey Mustard to Black Olives. Subway demands its customers come well researched and well versed with its menu, even if it means losing customers (or never having them in the first place).
Over the years, nothing changed with
Subway - on one side my middle class upbringing did not let me order
anything other than the cheapest option of Sub Of the Day (the only option that costs less than a plate of Biryani), and on the
other side, Subway's own determination to never change its looks, taste and
equal conviction to provide the same element of "choice" to customers in terms of breads,
vegetables and sauces, even though its sales never looked up in India. The only thing that changed was that occasionally I began to crave a Sub over Biriyani and also, that my dietary needs changed from a perpetually hungry student to a more diet conscious small-sized-portion-eating working woman for whom a 6 inch Sub would suffice as a meal.
Subway's latest advertisement on YouTube, still positions itself as a
brand that provides freedom by giving the element of choice to its
customers. Still, after so many years, it still has not understood that Indians do not seek such choice in a country of standardized menus - that go to the extent that multiple Indian curries in most restaurant serve the same gravy base.
But really, what is the value of such freedom and choice for those who neither know the difference between mint mustard sauce and chipolata ? Of all the time I have spent at Subway stores, there's always the divide between those what a Halapeno is and those who get bewildered by a Jalapeno. If you thought customer was the king for a brand, then Subway's counter-intuitive strategies to continue to bewilder, confuse and belittle the consumer's lack of knowledge of its ingredients and processes. My parents, for example, refuse to ever pick up a Subway for me, even if they visit a mall, because they mind the entire process too complex and too elitist and too alienating for them.
The idea of 'Choice' among consumers as Sheena Iyengar correctly pointed
out in her book 'The Art of Choosing' is very much a subjective
cultural term. Much like most of the books written in business book
genre to which her book belongs (Iyengar is a business school
professor), the core idea was illustrated and re-illustrated and
re-re-illustrated through multiple examples - one of which was the idea
of choice in the soda market. In many countries, a store stocking a few
brands of soda would mean the consumers are spoilt over choice, whereas
in the US, unless an entire section is stocked with more than 20 varieties of soda, it isn't really much of a choice for a consumer. In
the former type, the idea of having access to a soda drink was
considered immense choice of consumers (who were indifferent to the
brand differentiation that existed in the category - a soda drink was a
soda drink, as long as they could just about get their hands on any),
whereas in the more consumerist society, like the US, a stack of soda
options, with minute differences in taste, constitute enough "choice"
for the consumers.
In India, no one orders a salad without standard dish with variations - except occasionally asking for mellowing down the spice content of the gravy. A biriyani isn't a biriyani, if you ask it to be made in olive oil and with brown rice, and an Idli is a Idli, served the same way all over India.
Why then doesn't Subway understand that no one seeks choice in a sandwich, and that too a choice of items unknown to local palette and local taste? With its sales not growing world over, it almost seems like Subway is on its way to a dead end.
