Siddhartha Golu

Two words recurrently came to my mind while I was reading the book – “Hauntingly beautiful”.

That's how brilliant this book is. I would've given it 10 out of 5 stars, if I could. Orwell delivers a masterful stroke of fiction – or is it fiction? It seems more like a premonition of sorts, a guide as to what could possibly happen in future if we're not careful. I had heard about what a genius Orwell was - and though I got a taste of it in “Animal Farm” – “1984” was kind-of-a full blown force hitting your face!

In short, this is a story of the world in a dystopian setting, where a Totalitarian empire presides over much of humanity, controlling them in every aspect possible – down to their thoughts. A world where every action of yours is recorded and monitored by the “Telescreen” – not unlike the “All-Seeing Eye” from Lord of the Rings.

With all of the debate surrounding the FBI vs. Apple case and NSA and privacy, I fear we are slowly reaching towards the Orwellian universe. With that in mind, I think this line summarizes it the best – “1984 was a warning, not an instruction manual”.

I have had a very curious relationship with religion, although now that I talk to others, it was a much more normal experience than what I led myself to believe. I followed the typical path of receiving a particular religion from my parents (born a “Hindu child”), which had a supporting role in my life up until my late-teenage/early-adolescent years.

As is the norm for every child brought up in religion, I used to consider myself special believing that I had a “personal relationship” with God. There are so many good things about religion, but this in particular I believe to be the best part - this soothing feeling that somebody is watching over you in times of distress. During my early college years when I lost my faith, I was most afraid of having lost this rescuer of last resort (I wrote a short poem on this which you can read here). During times of despair, I frequently wondered what would've happened had I not been brought up in a religious family.

This book combines two of the most morally contentious issues that have always puzzled me - Religion and having a child. While I don't swing to the other extreme of subscribing to antinatalistic views, I do frequently wonder how it is that people don't question the morality of bringing a sentient being into the world, whose life (to a major extent) will be affected by how they are brought up by their parents. Children are shaped by the identity of their parents during their formative years, and require a significant struggle during their adolescence to be able to make independent decisions of their own. This struggle is more pronounced in matters of faith - an overwhelming majority of children wind up believing in the same gods that their parents believe in.

What can be done to lessen this automatic behavior so that children are more confident of picking their own battles and faith? This book presents insights from the people who tried to do exactly that.

It is a wonderful collection of essays from parents who are non-religious and want to bring up their child in an environment which enables them to question the authority and dogma. While just raising them secular doesn't make them superior to everybody else - bigotry is never dependent on faith - it is the independent exploration that is crucial. The essays deal with nuances of raising children in secular homes, going pretty much against the society, and how to deal with disagreements. Unfortunately, there are few essays in the end which swings the pendulum to the other end, concerned with finding “Humanist” and “Unitarian” communities which I found to be dull, however, the rest of the book remains a pleasant and insightful read.

My notebook is filled with highlights from the book, but there's one paragraph in particular that I want to share, which nicely defines the central theme of these essays.

One thread runs throughout this book: Encourage a child to think well, then trust her to do so. Removing religion by no means guarantees kids will think independently and well. Consider religion itself: Kids growing up in a secular home are at the same risk of making uninformed decisions about religion as are those in deeply religious homes. In order to really think for themselves about religion, kids must learn as much as possible about religion as a human cultural expression while being kept free of the sickening idea that they will be rewarded in heaven or punished in hell based on what they decide—a bit of intellectual terrorism we should never inflict on our kids, nor on each other. They must also learn what has been said and thought in opposition to religious ideas. If my kids think independently and well, then end up coming to conclusions different from my own—well, I'd have to consider the possibility that I've gotten it all wrong, then. Either way, in order to own and be nourished by their convictions, kids must ultimately come to them independently. Part of our wonderfully complex job as parents is to facilitate that process without controlling it.

Lacking structure but a decent introduction to the world of open-source software and the background work that goes into maintaining them.

I don't have a lot of friends who are supporters of the ruling BJP (well at least the ones who have disclosed it publicly), and consequently whenever the conversation shifts towards the ongoings in India, more often than not, we find ourselves agreeing with each other. Although this is perfectly alright for me on most days, on few ocaasions, I find a shadow of a doubt slowly creeping up inside - what if I'm living inside a bubble, an echo-chamber where I only get exposed to the ideas which I already hold to be true, especially relevant now that everything in our lives are getting regulated by algorithms. Whenever this confirmation bias hits me, I long to read something contrarian, to engage with the other side and to try to put myself in their shoes.

So it was with a pleasant surprise that I found out one day, one of my friends “coming out of the closet” and to declare him(her)self to be a supporter of the ruling party. I grabbed the chance to finally be able to hear the arguments from the other side and so, I broke my cardinal rule of not engaging in political debates on social media and contacted him/her. The result was devastating. We passionately debated our views and had heated discussions throughout the day, in the end agreeing that maybe we shouldn't have bothered to hit each other up after all. I was visibly distressed for a few days after this incident, as if a small flicker of hope had died in that encounter.

If two educated and privileged youths in their early twenties were unable to agree on something as basic as whether Muslims deserve to live in India, or whether India should really become a “Hindu Rashtra” or not, what hope could I have from the millions of others who didn't have the same privileges as us?

Reading this book brought that hopelessness to the front once again. There are hard-hitting truths written here, things that we would sooner like to forget lest they cause us pain and make vivid the grim reality of our times. But like a festering wound which devours our body if unattended, ignorance is not bliss but a vicious disease which paralyzes us faster than we might think.

My appeal to whoever is reading this would be - reach out to others, engage in conversations, don't dismiss the whole debate as “unnecessary politics” - your mere existence is political. Politics is not about discussing who should be the next PM, it's about discussing ideas and how you view others who are different than yourself, to engage with empathy and to embrace the differences, and to speak out against wrongs.

I'll leave you with a powerful passage from the book itself, where Arundhati Roy laments about the role each of us plays in how the future shapes itself:

After twenty years of writing fiction and nonfiction that tracks the rise of Hindu nationalism, after years of reading about the rise and fall of European fascism, I have begun to wonder why fascism—although it is by no means the same everywhere—is so recognizable across histories and cultures. It's not just the fascists that are recognizable—the strong man, the ideological army, the squalid dreams of Aryan superiority, the dehumanization and ghettoization of the “internal enemy,” the massive and utterly ruthless propaganda machine, the false-flag attacks and assassinations, the fawning businessmen and film stars, the attacks on universities, the fear of intellectuals, the specter of detention camps, and the hate-fueled zombie population that chants the Eastern equivalent of “Heil! Heil! Heil!” It's also the rest of us—the exhausted, quarreling opposition, the vain, nit-picking Left, the equivocating liberals who spent years building the road that has led to the situation we find ourselves in, and are now behaving like shocked, righteous rabbits who never imagined that rabbits were an important ingredient of the rabbit stew that was always on the menu. And, of course, the wolves who ignored the decent folks' counsel of moderation and sloped off into the wilderness to howl unceasingly, futilely—and, if they were female, then “shrilly” and “hysterically”—at the terrifying, misshapen moon. All of us are recognizable.

This is just a placeholder until I find the time to properly convey my thoughts because this book absolutely deserves it.

Dull in the beginning, but it picked up the pace around halfway through the book. Many people had recommended this to me claiming it was a more accurate representation of our current world than Orwell's “1984”. I agree with them to an extent, however it did not leave quite the impression that Orwell's masterpiece had on my mind.

Absurdist classic - that's certainly the best way to describe this book! Kurt beautifully interweaves humor with brutal realities of war, which is aided by the strange storyline of the book. Through the Tralfamadorian philosophy, he points the flaws in us Earthlings' way of living the life. As one of the characters say in the book -

“That's one thing Earthlings might learn to do, if they tried hard enough: Ignore the awful times, and concentrate on the good ones.”

My first dive into the works of Camus and I loved it. Although the first half was a bore to get through, part two picked up the pace and the last few pages were amazing! Would definitely go back to this once I've read the rest of Camus' works.

There are two kinds of favourite books for me; one where every chapter brings with it a fresh wave of insights about things hitherto unclear for me, and another where I get amazed by the love, understanding and empathy that is on display throughout the book. I guess this is the age-old debate of reading for pleasure and utility, between fiction and non-fiction.

I don't have anything new to add to the conversation, except that there's a place in my heart which longs for warm, fuzzy feelings - emotions that I only get from reading certain kinds of fiction. Zen Pencils is one of them. All the Light We Cannot See and The Book Thief belong there. This book marks another entry to that club. Such a joy all throughout!

This was exactly what I had expected. An honest, inside look from the man who, it would not be hyperbole to say, changed the course of history for internet activism.

I tried to sit down multiple times to write my thoughts on this, but alas, they've been eluding me for quite some time now. Needless to say, this feminist manifesto doesn't require any introduction and I can't do a proper review right now, so I'll just give a personal push to folks reading this - pick it up even if you don't plan to finish it, as the parts in themselves are power punches.

I remember first knowing about the Sackler family when Jon Oliver did a segment on them, and I remember feeling infuriated. Little did I know about the empire that they had created, riding on the wave of people's addictions, creating and fueling the opioid crisis and absolving themselves of all the blame while at the same time, putting up their names on all the Ivy league buildings.

It's sickening to learn how the rich always get a preferential treatment by law and society.

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This is also available on my website here.

The only “problem” I had with this book was because it was a collection of short stories. Every time I started to like or feel sympathy towards a character, the story ended. It was like giving someone a paroxysm of happiness - and quickly stabbing them in the back! This might be an exaggeration - it probably is - but therein lies the brilliance of Jhumpa Lahiri. She intertwines the chaos and serenity so beautifully that you can't help but fall in love with every aspect of life - although more often than not, her stories have a low-key and slightly underwhelming end.

The stories typically consist of Non-resident Indians struggling to come to terms with living in a foreign land. Characters are relatable and Lahiri masterfully uses a mixture of cliches and contrasts to prove her point.

I'd definitely recommend this one!

Find this review - and some more - on my website here.
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Started with a tightly-knit structure, but faltered at the end. The last few chapters were a slog to get through - mostly because of numerous “business-class” style case studies.

Main takeaway? Other than the central idea around which the book revolves (and succinctly mentioned as the book subtitle too), the idea of interleaving is what struck me the most. I had already read about this particular method in Michael Nielsen's brilliant post on Anki (Augmenting Long-term Memory) and it was interesting to read about it formally in the book. Interleaving is the technique of mixing up your learning in varied environments so that it makes some unusual connections that you'd normally won't think about - and might come in handy when you are faced with a problem in a new environment you haven't previously encountered.

In the end, “Range” suffers from the same deficiencies that a lot of other pop-psychology/self-management books suffer from - too many anecdotal evidence and case studies. A reviewer here on Goodreads summed it the best - “Finally, Range is designed to appeal to people who are already skeptical of specialization/ enthusiastic about generalized skillsets. I worry that some of the appreciation of this book is just a soothing exercise in confirmation bias for generalists.”

Still, I'd recommend it to people who (like me) are skeptical about their tendency to dabble in too many disparate fields at the same time - this might be the soothing pill that you were looking for.

It's a uniquely strange experience, when you try to put yourself into others' shoes. It feels fake, dishonest even, to say that you “understand” how the other person must be feeling. Empathy can be a strong force, but it can never be a substitute for the original feeling. A Caucasian man can never feel what an African-American man must be living with, day in and day out. Same thing between a Brahmin and a Dalit, and a man and a woman.

We're swimming so deep into the ocean of privilege that a mere acknowledgment of it stands out. Nowhere have I found it to be so stark when thinking about gender. I was having a conversation with my partner the other day about how traveling solo is a lovely experience and the serendipity and chance encounters make up for a unique experience. She said that if she travelled solo, every minute she would be worrying about her safety and the thought would overpower any other experiences that she'd be having. I would've never thought about my safety, she would've never thought about anything else.

All of this, just because I happened to be born a male.

I've tried to educate myself over the years, mostly by reading books and interacting with others. “Chup” takes the leading place in that body of work which tries to show and explain gender imbalance. I came across the book when Alice Evans brought it up during an episode on the podcast The Seen and The Unseen (I cannot recommend this episode enough!). It comprises of a series of interviews taken of women who are feminist in belief but not in behaviour. These women are not explicitly suppressed or subjugated by patriarchal dominance, however it lays bare how generations of cultural and societal reinforcements dominate one's thoughts.

The author, Deepa Narayan, holds no bar when discussing how society trains women to be non-existent. She writes:

Drawing on the details of the lives of women and men I interviewed, each over several hours, I found that girls are trained in seven cultural habits of non-existence. These are - deny the body; be quiet; please others; deny your sexuality; isolate yourself; have no individual identity; and be dependent. It is deep training in these habits that makes so many women feminists in belief but not in behaviour. Feminists with bad habits.

How raising awareness about bias is not enough, that it can actually increase bias. “If everyone does it, why not me?” Only when the biases are labelled undesirable do they disappear.

No women used the word “ambitious” to describe herself, it is still a dirty word even for women who have taken a strong intellectual stance on equality.

When we asked women about their biggest fear, it is invariably about loss of family and safety of family members, it is hardly ever about the self. This too makes sense. Most women are searching for freedom within families, not freedom from families.

Men who argue are called leaders, while the language of war and weapons is frequently used when talking about women who argue.

In a land of 1.3 billion people, one can safely assume that sex is not a new discovery. Yet we still act like we found something novel.

The tendency to put a rug over or speak in a hush-hush voice about Menstruation. Think about it - it's a routine, monthly process through which half of the population goes through every month for at least 30-40 years of their lives! Yet, women still feel ashamed to say “I'm having my periods today”, instead opting for more benign “I'm down today”.

Men, on the other hand, have a lot of words for vaginas, none of which are used in polite company or denote respect. Most are used as swear words. This is true all over the world. Women whose mother tongue is Hindi or Punjabi are more comfortable saying the word vagina in English than the words in their native languages. It is safer saying the word in a foreign language than in the language of their own heavily shame/guilt/fear-laden native context of their childhood. This was true for women from the ages of 17 to over 65. Babies come out of the “susu wali jagah”.

At a Filmfare award night event screened on television, every major female superstar from Deepika Padukone to the young Alia Bhatt bent her whole body forward, head towards the lap, and covered her mouth with her hands while laughing, so that her face was almost hidden. None of the male stars did so – they laughed heartily with their heads thrown back a little and mouths wide open.

The most institutionalized form of competition and meanness is evident in the saas–bahu soap dramas, a response to a structured system in which women derive their power from competing and fighting for control over the same powerful man, the son/husband.

The first time I took the Implicit Gender Bias test available online, I was stunned. I discovered that I was biased against women. I took the test several times, but the results did not change. This means of course that I am biased against myself. My cultural habits went deeper than my intellectual awareness, my work and my commitment to equality.

This book has helped me notice my own biases against women. It has transformed the way I look at gender relations, and perhaps an unintended consequence, made me more hopeless about the state of affairs. I've tried to circulate its copies to people close to me, not as a gesture of holier-than-thou “you should read this” frat boy attitude, but simply because I think this book deserves a wider audience.

I remember hearing about Elizabeth Holmes when I was in my late teens, at that impressionable age when you get hyper-inspired by reading about icons that are going to change the world. There was a profile of her in Wired, with an eye-catching image of her wearing a turtleneck black sweater holding what looked like a test-tube with a tiny amount of blood with a science-y background. I remember it had made quite a distinct impression on my mind, no doubt helped by the fact that the profile had described her as “this Stanford dropout 20-something who was hailed as being a younger version of Einstein, was going to change the world”.

Undoubtedly, as so often happens, I forgot about people who were gonna change the world as I grew up. Then I heard about this book last year, which was getting enormously praised for its exposé of a Silicon Valley firm and was really surprised to find out that the company at the center of the storm was Theranos, the brainchild of Elizabeth Holmes. This book reads like a detective novel, meticulously giving the clues and binding the threads of the deception that Holmes had so carefully and brilliantly constructed and managed to fool the entire world. Read this one if you want to get a lesson in how not to emulate a leader.

I had picked up this one thinking it to be an autobiography, and with an expectation that it'll cover Rajan's tussles with the government in more details. I was pleasantly surprised to find instead a good collection of technical essays covering the workings of RBI, and economics in general. If you're looking for a good explanatory work in the field of Economics (and especially those concerning India and its policies), you'll enjoy this.

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This is also available on my website here.

It's so strange to find a book beloved by everyone else, and find it so disappointing. The more I kept listening to the audiobook, the more and more I kept getting annoyed at his false modesty and complete sense of disrespect for people that he made fun of. Maybe he was a charming, goofy guy in his personal life - and there's no question about his legacy in his professional life - but if the intent of this book was to show how down-to-earth, carefree and charming Dr. Feynman was, it had exactly the opposite effect on me.

Pulling a prank on innocent bystanders and having a good laugh about it is one thing; deliberately keeping your tips in glasses full of water and then boasting about the mess that the waitress had to deal with in his memoir is a completely different thing altogether. And I had just started the chapter about his “bar outings” and how he used to pick up girls there, that's when I lost all patience for the book.

For people having some time on their hands, please read this: Surely you're a creep, Mr Feynman

Two main takeaways from this book:

* Developing/Developed world categorization is bullshit - instead divide the world into four levels of income.

Level 1 (poorest) - approx. 1 billion people
Level 2 (lower-to-middle income) - approx. 3 billion people
Level 3 (middle-to-upper income) - approx. 2 billion people
Level 4 (richest) - approx. 1 billion people

* Dollar Street - an amazing idea of seeing people living the same kind of life across countries on the same income level. So keep in mind that affluent Africans are living as lavishly as affluent Americans and poorest Indians the same as poorest French, on an equal basis of income.

Despite some reservations, I would recommend this to my pessimist friends who think that the world is just doomed. It probably is - but it's also getting better.

If you've read Thinking Fast and Slow, you've read this book.

Edit: Recently, I came across an article quite critical of the facts presented in this book, which came as a shock to me. Here's the link to the article - Why We Sleep is riddled with scientific and factual errors . While this severely damages the reputation of the book, my stance remains unchanged - that sleep is of utmost importance in our lives and we really do need to give it prominence.

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Original Review:

An exceptional book that is also a cautionary tale for our society. In our productivity-obsessed twenty-first century, sleep usually takes the backseat in our race to get more done with our limited time. I myself have been guilty of that, on multiple occasions - trying to fit all the things that I want to do in a day and consequently ignoring this wonderful remedy to all my problems. We have idolized people who seem to achieve extraordinary things on less than an optimal amount of sleep for far too long.

We need to pull ourselves back from the race, slow down, and get a good night's sleep. As it turns out and quite contrary to the popular belief - the more sleep you get, the more productive you are.

PS: For anyone wondering about the optimal duration of sleep, eight hours really is the recommended time - which includes the time you take to drift off to sleep (normally 10-15 mins), five cycles consisting of NREM and REM sleep of 90 mins each, and the time you take to get fully conscious after waking up (another 10 mins).

I have been riding motorcycles for past 7 years. I've had so many crashes in the early days that people were afraid of sitting as a pillion on my bike. Slowly I started internalizing few things and gradually the accidents stopped. This is a typical journey of how you learn any skill. However, it becomes a problem if you never give yourself a chance to see your skills from first principles and examine bad patterns that you might have internalized.Reading this book was a refreshing reminder to examine how I ride a motorcycle.This didn't teach me anything extraordinary, but it explained so many things that I had, just sort of, accepted as given. Like how tyre pressure affects a bike's traction, why counter-steering works, why front brakes are much more powerful (and should be used more frequently) than rear brakes, and on and on.Pick up this book if you'd like to improve, and understand, how you ride.

There are few books which leave you in a mesmerizing state after having read them. You ponder about it for days to come, want to scream your head off about it to anyone who'd listen, and then dwell in this fear of picking up another book because how can something else ever come close to being this perfect! I have felt this way before - first when I'd finished The Complete Sherlock Holmes, later when I was left in a daze for multiple days after finishing the notorious and brilliant House of Leaves, and much more recently when I was unable to sleep after reading Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker.

Behave is one of those few books.

I first heard about Dr. Sapolsky when my then-girlfriend recommended me one of his lectures on Depression (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOAgplgTxfc&t=632s) from his popular lecture series titled “Human Behavioral Biology” (Playlist available on Youtube). I was immediately taken in. He reminded me of those hilariously brilliant and yet humble grand-dads with whom you can be best friends with (of course, only seen in the movies) - and I picked up this book the very next day.

Dr. Sapolsky is a neuroendocrinologist by profession and currently a professor of biology and neurology at Stanford. To save you the pain of having to look up neuroendocrinologist - it's the branch of biology which studies how the brain regulates the hormonal activity in the body. From the late 70s to early 90s, he spent a vast majority of his time studying the social behaviors of baboons in the wild - something that features prominently in this book where he discusses different social behaviors of humans and how they relate to our biology. He writes early on in the book -

Some of the time, we are indeed just like any other animal. When we're scared, we secrete the same hormone as would some subordinate fish getting hassled by a bully. The biology of pleasure involves the same brain chemicals in us as in a capybara. Neurons from humans and brine shrimp work the same way. House two female rats together, and over the course of weeks, they will synchronize their reproductive cycles so that they wind up ovulating within a few hours of each other. Try the same with two human females (as reported in some but not all studies), and something similar occurs. It's called the Wellesley effect, first shown with roommates at all-women's Wellesley College. And when it comes to violence, we can be just like some other apes—we pummel, we cudgel, we throw rocks, we kill with our bare hands. So some of the time an intellectual challenge is to assimilate how similar we can be to other species. In other cases, the challenge is to appreciate how, though human physiology resembles that of other species, we use the physiology in novel ways. We activate the classical physiology of vigilance while watching a scary movie. We activate a stress response when thinking about mortality. We secrete hormones related to nurturing and social bonding but in response to an adorable baby panda. And this certainly applies to aggression—we use the same muscles as does a male chimp attacking a sexual competitor, but we use them to harm someone because of their ideology.

Various muscles have moved, and a behavior has happened. Perhaps it is a good act: you've empathically touched the arm of a suffering person. Perhaps it is a foul act: you've pulled a trigger, targeting an innocent person. Perhaps it is a good act: you've pulled a trigger, drawing fire to save others. Perhaps it is a foul act: you've touched the arm of someone, starting a chain of libidinal events that betray a loved one. Acts that, as emphasized, are definable only by context.

If you had to boil this book down to a single phrase, it would be “It's complicated.” Nothing seems to cause anything; instead, everything just modulates something else. Scientists keep saying, “We used to think X, but now we realize that . . .” Fixing one thing often messes up ten more, as the law of unintended consequences reigns. On any big, important issue, it seems like 51 percent of the scientific studies conclude one thing, and 49 percent conclude the opposite. And so on. Eventually, it can seem hopeless that you can actually fix something, can make things better. But we have no choice but to try. And if you are reading this, you are probably ideally suited to do so. You've amply proven you have intellectual tenacity. You probably also have running water, a home, adequate calories, and low odds of festering with a bad parasitic disease. You probably don't have to worry about Ebola virus, warlords, or being invisible in your world. And you've been educated. In other words, you're one of the lucky humans. So try.

Now that I've moved away from reading fiction, I find that I face a lot of inertia to pick up something purely for pleasure. Maybe this is a nasty by-product of wanting to be as “productive” as possible. But the more I have drifted away from reading for pleasure, more mechanical the whole process has become for me. Partly to avoid this feeling, and partly because of my shame at seeing my bookshelf filled with dusty unread books, I picked up this one to assuage my feelings of guilt.

I had not expected the journey to be this beautiful!

Salman Rushdie doesn't need an introduction. He has been routinely hailed amongst one of the best contemporary writers of our time. It only speaks of my ignorance that I had only heard about him because of his controversies - outcry for Satanic Verses, fatwa issued against him - and only knew that one of his novels, Midnight's Children, had won a Booker Prize. I don't have a fond memory of reading Booker Prize winning books, bitter from the day I read White Tiger by Aravind Adiga. But as I got sucked into the universe created by Rushdie, my initial skepticism gave way to awe and admiration.

Rushdie has a peculiar way with words, an authoritative stance where the sentences bend over backwards to dance to the master's tunes. He weaves them in and out and creates intricate relationships between the story, storyteller and reader. You need to be acquainted with the history of India and Pakistan, or at least be familiar with the events surrounding the partition, in order to grasp fully what he has set out here to do. The book is filled with brilliant uses of metaphors and similes, creating a parallel universe of Pakistan during the tumultuous years after partition. The sentences are measured and precise, neatly packed with an intricate plot and the social commentary (with a tinge of satire) leading you towards the destination.

If it's not yet clear, I unashamedly loved every part of Shame and I'm excited to dig more into Rushdie's works!

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This is also available on my website here.

Ethics is hard.

If I've learnt something all these years, it is this universal maxim. Everybody wishes they'd make ethically sound choices in their lives, but more often than not, ethical choices are in contrast with cost and convenience. Nowhere is this more apparent than the way we consume food.

There are a lot of similarities between food and religion. Both are deeply personal choices which are erroneously thought of as having a clear, set winning answer. Both divide people into disjoint sets where they vehemently try to outdo one another in following “The Right Way”. And of course, both are deeply political.

My personal journey in food, as in religion, has been quite tumultuous. Coming from a vegetarian family, I used to feel discomfort in sitting at the same table where somebody was eating meat, used to scoff at the smell of eggs and couldn't go near anything related to fish (this is still the case). Then somewhere along the way, I decided that I don't have a right to reject things which I haven't experienced myself and started indulging in this forbidden fruit. I tried everything I could get my hands on, but never reached that stage where I could appreciate the hype. Having gotten a taste of the other side, I made the decision to quit everything and slowly move back to being a vegetarian/vegan.

This was the point where I started to seek out reasons to convince me of my choice, and came across this book.

I wouldn't call this a balanced book in the sense that the authors' convictions are clear from the start, however where this shines is the way they use evidence to reach their conclusions rather than playing on guilt and shame. The basic fact remains, and this I have confirmed with many of my non-vegetarian friends as well, that we know too little about where our food comes from and our choices would be different if we were armed with this knowledge. The authors visit few American families and observe their eating habits, and then take us through some factory farms where the brutalities are quite graphic and sometimes hard to read and difficult to digest.

However, one qualm that I had while reading through these chapters, was the over-importance of ethics in our everyday choices. Not everyone wants to live a Kantian life full of moments filled with questioning their every choice. Life is hard to live anyway. I was delighted though to find a section dealing with this exhaustion:

Sometimes the very success of the ethical consumer movement and the proliferation of consumer concerns it has spawned seems to threaten the entire ethical consumption project. When one ethical concern is heaped upon another and we struggle to be sure that our purchases do not contribute to slave labor, animal exploitation, land degradation, wetland pollution, rural depopulation, unfair trade practices, global warming, and the destruction of rain-forests, it may all seem so complicated that we could be tempted to forget about everything except eating what we like and can afford.