The Hindu Business Line : Everything is interesting if you go deep enough

IN 1972, nineteen-year-old A.V. Seshagiri wrote an eight-page letter from Bombay to Richard P. Feynman. "He had a severe stuttering problem. He said he was being tortured and tormented as a result of his speech impediment, and he also had problems with teachers," informs Don't You Have Time to Think, edited by Michelle Feynman, and published by Allen Lane (www.penguin.com).

"He was sought after not only for his scientific achievements but also for his outsized curiosity, his irrepressible love of puzzles, and his embrace of life at large," writes the editor about her celebrity father in the vastly educative collection of letters that the book is.

Okay, what did the icon Feynman write to Seshagiri? Thus: "It is fortunate that you are interested in physics because such a study is not seriously impeded by a speech difficulty. In fact physics must be studied alone — you must teach yourself. Do not worry so much about your instructors." Towards the end of the book is this response dated July 21, 1986, addressed to an anxious father. "When you are young you only want to go as fast, as far, and as deep as you can in one subject — all the others are neglected as being relatively uninteresting. But later on when you get older you find nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough... The two of you — father and son — should take walks in the evening and talk (without purpose or routes) about this and that."

Good compilation of the Nobel Laureate's thoughts.

Special operations with quiet professionals

A CONTINGENT of 175 Mongolian soldiers were deployed to Iraq to help the US troops in policing that conquered country, writes Robert D. Kaplan in Imperial Grunts, from Random House (www.randomhouse). "It constituted the first entry of Mongol troops into Mesopotamia since 1258, when Hulagu Khan, a grandson of Genghis Khan, exterminated most of the population of Baghdad, the capital of the Abbasid caliphate," narrates Kaplan.

The invaders had destroyed the irrigation system, "reducing Mesopotamia to a malarial swamp from which it never quite recovered." The book recounts the author's odyssey through the barracks for a ground level view of the outposts. Do you know that the US has "bases and base rights in 59 countries and overseas territories, with troops on deployments from Greenland to Nigeria, and from Norway to Singapore"? Add to this the work of the US Army's Special Operations Command in 170 countries a year, "with an average of 9 quiet professionals on each mission". Yet, defence appropriations amount to only 3.3 per cent of the US's GDP "compared to 9.4 per cent during the Vietnam War and 14.1 per cent during the Korean War."

From Kiribati to World Bank

DUE to `a terrible misunderstanding' J. Maarten Troost finds himself working as a consultant to the World Bank. "I am not exactly sure what it was that led the World Bank to believe I had any expertise in infrastructure finance. I had never even balanced a chequebook. I hadn't even tried. There is not much reason to balance a cheque book when your account rarely tops the three-figure mark," he writes in The Sex Lives of Cannibals, from Black Swan (www.booksattransworld.co.uk).

The book is about his experiences in Kiribati. The government there emulates the North Korean model, according to Troost. "It practises what I like to call Coconut Stalinism. It controls everything. It does nothing." At the Americans' sense of history too, he takes a dig. "Ask a college student who Jimmy Carter was and they will likely reply that he was a general in the Civil War, which occurred in 1492, when Americans dumped tea into the Gulf of Tonkin, sparking off the First World War, which ended with the invasion of Grenada and the development of the cotton press." Gasp! Troost would, however, be impressed with that answer; because "the more likely response is `Who cares'?" Fly Air Kiribati.

Four steps for an excellent chat

MAKE eye contact, smile, find that approachable person, and offer your name and use theirs. "Remember the following four steps and you are well on your way to an excellent chat," assures Debra Fine in The Fine Art of Small Talk, from Hyperion (www.HyperionBooks.com). "The true effort is taking the risk to be the first to say hello. There is no perfect icebreaker," says Fine. Try not to add your name to `the Conversational Criminals Most Wanted' list, cautions the author.

Essential read!

You don't need money for good journalism

THE scene: A newspaper conference in Stockholm. "Everyone was bemoaning the death of journalism, killed by accountants and their demands for cost-effective reporting," writes Phillip Knightley in A Hack's Progress, from Roli (www.rolibooks.com).

The next speaker was "a young woman from a small town paper in America's mid-west." What did she have to say? "The town's citizens had failed for years to persuade the railroad company to install gates at a level crossing. One day the train hit a truck. No one was injured but the reporter said she decided to investigate what other heavy vehicles used that crossing. The answer was three school buses. So she wrote a story saying over a hundred local kids were in danger of death each day. Within 24 hours of her paper hitting the streets, the railroad company had agreed to install the gates."

Her message was this: "You don't need money for good journalism. You just need the will." Knightley agrees.

"She is right, of course. So my advice for the new generation of journalism is to ignore the accountants, the proprietors and the conventional editors and get on with it. And your assignment is the same as mine has been — the world and the millions of fascinating people who inhabit it."

Wish the media heeded these words!

Books courtesy: Landmark www.landmarkonthenet.com

Tailpiece

"I was so afraid of competition... "

"That you joined them?"

"No, I changed my line of business!"

ReadingRoom@TheHindu.co.in

D. Murali

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