In Baker Street and Botswana

I am a complete sucker for good mystery novels. I regularly pester my librarian to recommend something very interesting and offbeat but with no killings and every single time he is perplexed. I mean, who would want to read mystery novels that do not involve bloodshed? (Answer : Me !!).

I recently used a gift coupon that I was awarded for something (I don’t remember what!) for the Strands book store in Bangalore. Now my manager will tell you the kind of tantrums I throw every time he asks me to travel to Bangalore for a meeting. Trust me, it has nothing to do with the city itself. It is more to do with one of my many afflictions - inertia. I hate travelling (I hate it when Word insists on correcting MY spellings just because IT was taught incorrect English!!), as I have no doubt mentioned about 1 million times in my posts. However, this time it was different. The card was valid only for a year and I was dying to come to Bangalore and get a few books. My intention was to get only books on humour - and that is my way of saying only PG Wodehouse- but I ended up buying the entire Sherlock Holmes collection.

Sherlock Holmes was not my most favourite detective when I was young. I hated his know-all attitude and his regular habit of figuring out everything and revealing them to the unsuspecting reader and dear Watson*, with every intention to draw as many compliments on his intelligence as possible without appearing to do so (Did that sentence finally end?). I was never a part of his thinking process. It is a different thing that those days Hardy boys were my favourite sleuths. Nancy Drew lost her sheen when she started acting all coy and mushy in the later novels and also when I realized that she rarely solved mysteries without the help of ’strange co-incidences’. On television too, Byomkesh Bakshi was doing splendidly till he too had to fall for a woman and become a householder. It was a little later that I realized that Bakshi was modeled after Holmes in many respects including the physical appearance.

Now that I am all grown up (too much, I would say), I am able to appreciate Holmes a lot more than before (and that has nothing to do with the fact that ultra-cool Robert Downey Jr., played Holmes in the movie version !!). Thanks to PGW, I also understand the British sense of humour and sarcasm more than before. So it is no wonder that I am actually enjoying the book a lot. After a long long time, I was reading a book on the flight. Of course the other reason was also that stupid Lufthansa did not have individual TV screens on the flights to US!

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s unlikely hero is as popular as he was when the book was first written primarily because the author has created a flesh and blood character. I love it when the characters in a novel/movie are flawed, because it makes them that much more relatable. Holmes is almost a sociopath and looks down upon most people. He shoots up cocaine regularly (as described in ‘The sign of four’) to compensate for his boredom. He is a misogynist and is upstaged only once (from what I have read so far) by a woman called Irene Adler, whom he ends up admiring for the very reason.

The author also explains the method behind Holmes’ madness. Holmes is what he is, because he assimilates information better than others. He even tells Watson that he sees and hears what others see but registers some things better. He has no interest in anything that will not help him in his profession, apart from playing the violin. His respect and love for Watson is almost surprising, given that Watson plays the role of only a loyal friend rather than assistant in Holmes’ adventures, nor does he appear to be an intellectual match for Holmes!

With passing years, I realize that I have a thing for sociopathic intellectual people - at least as characters in a novel or in a movie. Holmes, Mark Zuckerberg (as portrayed in ‘The Social Network’), the really rude genius Gregory House from House M.D (at least till he got all mushy and teary eyed - made me nauseous to see Hugh Laurie reduced to this!!), Jeffrey Deaver’s unlikely hero, the quadriplegic Lincoln Rhyme, Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the wind (at least in the beginning) - these are probably people I would hate in real life, but simply love in literature or movies, since they add a lot of colour to the story.

The other series, which is also to do with a detective also features an unlikely protagonist. The ‘No. 1 Ladies detective Agency’ series by Alexander McCall Smith, has as its principal character an ‘almost-forty’ year old full-figured woman called Precious Ramotswe. The series is set in the South African country Botswana.

Precious Ramotswe is everything that Holmes is not. Her cases are not always high-profile ones involving murder or robbery. She handles cases with her emotions and intuitions. She behaves like most women would and does not hesitate to adopt non-traditional sources like grapevine for information. She empathises with her clients and as a result does not make a lot of money.

Although every novel in the series centres around a case, the series is interesting because they give a glimpse of life in Botswana, the customs and the people. Cases are not always resolved in the conventional sense and not all stories end happily for the customers of ‘No.1 Ladies Detective Agency’.

A host of colourful characters like Mma Makutsi- Mma Ramotswe’s assistant, Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni - her fiance, who is always referred to by this name add more flavour to the novels. The philosophical musings of the protagonist in between are insightful and sometimes funny too.

I am right now reading the third book in the series - Morality for Beautiful Women. In times when feminism has come to mean arguing over trivialities and being different for the sake of it and when liberation has come to mean liberation from clothes and trying to please the very same set of people that we are apparently protesting against, it is really refreshing to read about a protagonist, who is a woman and who is very proud of the fact. Being a woman is not just incidental but instrumental in her approach to her work and to life in general. It is strange that a man had to write it though !!

*Incidentally, Holmes never seems to say ‘Elementary, my dear Watson’ any time !!

P.S : I did buy a PGW collection and another novel by PGW with the money that was left. Or to be honest, I bought Sherlock Holmes because I had some money left

I need a wake-up call...

This happened more than 17 years back, when I was still a teenager - way too cynical about everything around me. I prided myself in finding everything that is wrong with anything - movies, books, people, places etc. My cousin visited us after many years. Now, when I say cousin, please do not imagine another teenager. My cousin was a couple of years older than my father. In a family as big as my mother, this was not uncommon, nor was it uncommon to find nephews and nieces who were older than me!

Anyway, this cousin was one of the most creative people in my family. My mother had often told me how he would create small wonders and show-pieces out of waste articles like toys from coconut shells, paintings on the ceiling fan to give a lovely effect when the fan is switched on and so on. He was also popular in the family for having changed the maximum number of jobs within a certain number of years.

He described with great passion his current job in a prawn farm - how the prawns were bred, ‘harvested’ and then processed through machines which smeared them in bread crumbs, roasted them, packed them in tins them and so on. The love with which he described the process would have made one think that he loved eating prawns, had one not known that he had never tasted any.

We were talking about my school and the subjects. I was talking with the same indifference that one often finds in teenagers about how the whole system was wrong and how the subjects were of no use. Without seeming to advise he started talking fondly about the subjects and suggested I keep writing as I read, for it was easier to remember what one writes down than what one reads.

It is strange what memories one tends to carry from one’s past. I do not remember a lot of things from that year. I don’t even remember the exact year. I don’t really remember everything we talked about. However I do remember that we watched a mediocre tamil movie (and I still remember the title of the movie) and as always, I was pointing out the various faults with the movie - how absurd the dialogues sounded, how stupid the costumes looked etc. My cousin on the other had, suddenly said how interestingly an actor reacted or some such thing. I don’t remember exactly what he said, only that he managed to find something good in a trashy film!!

I would not say that I was jolted out of my negativity. I thought for a few days. I discussed it with my mother and realized that this person had probably more reasons to feel negative about one thing or the other. All the time he stayed at home, he did not speak anything negative about his previous jobs, but spoke with interest on his current one. It is a different story that he left this one a while later too, but the crux of the matter is how much he lived and loved the present.

I have often thought about that evening. I have not changed completely as a person. I did not become a motivational speaker overnight. I still get frustrated at uncertainty and with a lot of people inside and outside of work. But this memory has often helped in some small degree at least in putting aside the negativity for a while at least, if not come completely out of it.

Of late it has become increasingly difficult to stay positive. Changes at the workplace and constantly hearing how we are all ‘resources’ for the company and not people, news everyday bringing out one scandal after another in the country and in my state, large hoardings of corrupt politicians smiling shamelessly decorating the roads that I cannot avoid on the way to work - there are countless things that fuel the frustration and depression. I really wish I get another wake-up call to help me come out of it. One that will jolt me out of my coma and make me feel alive again!!