Discovering the Self in Reviews

“Boys from Good Families”, a novel by Usha KR was the first book that I read in 2020. When I happened to mention this to my cousin Mitali, she asked me if I would consider reviewing it for Kitaab. That’s how I ended up writing for the first time a formal book review following the ‘review format’ to authors in a literary magazine.

Like all researchers, reviews have been an integral part of my life. Scholarship in any domain is associated with the level of familiarity and depth of knowledge in published work. Reviewing helps to identify research gaps, define new and interesting problem statements, formulate original solutions and ultimately publish.

Neither research methodology nor philosophy of science was formally taught as part of my curriculum in either undergraduate or post graduate programs in Physics. Looking back, it appears like the assumption was that the students imbued the scientific method implicitly through pedagogy. The absence of an explicit discourse implied that we tended to follow the Baconian principles of ‘experiment, observation and inference’ somewhat unconsciously and uncritically.

Although practice of science absorbed me for many years, life always remained a mix of engineering problem solving, reading and contemplating literature, fiction, history and politics. During my PhD, my advisor Dr. Vijay Singh cast a hawk’s eye on the quality of what I wrote and we published. For nearly a decade after that, at Helios, Prof. Krishnan was extremely finicky about internal documentation laying enormous emphasis on model validation, usage of English language and grammar. My early mentors Kai Thomenius and Floris Jansen at GE’s Global Research were discerning about how to assess novelty and applicability of a piece of work and communicate it effectively to the community. The cumulative effect of twenty years spent in the spirit of an apprentice meant that I was a gnostic – a firm believer that high quality scientific research, its dissemination and its evaluation is fundamentally objective.

Like other argumentative Indians [1] and opinionated Bengalis, I usually had a view on the wider books that I read but even after the internet burst into polemics, I remained shy of sharing them. I had a peculiar sense of guilt that science was so inaccessible to those not trained in the subject matter while I could opine on a political event, its links with history; a management framework, its influence on corporate culture; the shades in the character of a novel or a play, whether it was a product of its context or just happened to be a human quirk.

With the passage of time, I came to realise that neither reporting and nor reviewing in science is necessarily objective. I have myself reacted sharply to graphs or tables without labels or units, measured or simulated physical parameters with arbitrary numbers after the decimal point that do not pay heed to significance, incomplete sentences, incorrect spellings and found it hard to appreciate or focus on the description of methods or experiments in a technical paper that required my feedback. Contrary to the self-test that I grew up to subject my own research and writing, I have repeatedly found my colleagues submitting manuscripts for peer review that in my opinion have obvious inadequacies. ‘Let the reviewers decide’ is not an unusual refrain.

Coming back to “Boys from Good Families”, the significance of Neel Kamal was unmistakable in Usha’s novel. It was the family home of Ashwath (the protagonist) and seen against the backdrop of the changes in his own life along with those of his sister, his young love and the landscape of Bangalore, it could be placed at the centre of a reading of the story. In a very well written review of how parental expectations from boys that typify Indian families and its consequences shape the novel, Carol Andrade appears to use Neel Kamal as a metaphor for what constitutes both a source of security and a burden of responsibility for Ashwath. In her review, while Harini Srinivasan highlights and comments on a number of key elements in the evolution of the story , she also confesses to a mystery that she sees at the heart of the novel. She cannot comprehend what turns Ashwath off so irreversibly from his family. Meenakshi Shivram views the novel as a love story with too many characters and subplots with too much attention to detail that robs it of its impact.

Writing for Kitaab, the first guideline that I needed to confront was not to use “I”. My natural style of prose leans heavily towards the use of active voice and first person. It does not in anyway hinder writing blogs but this was different. The second constraint was in the number of words. Limit on length is something I had to deal with in many of my research manuscripts because I tend to be detailed and always seem to have a lot to say. Brevity forces discipline and brings to focus what really stands out. In a book review, it seems likely to be influenced by the reader’s own perspective. I have an existentialist’s response to Ashwath’s character. The novel does not appear to me to be a love story. Neel Kamal to me is the obvious anchor but what fascinates me is how Ashwath embraces a life far away from his roots. The many other individuals whose stories and lives intersect that of Ashwath’s are subsumed in my reading and rereading of the epigraph. They do not distract me.

The visible or invisible presence of the reviewer is tellingly described in “How to Review a Novel” by Mary-Kay Wilmers. Taken together, this essay along with that of Elisabeth Pain on “How to review a paper” that I read in the course of writing this blog offer an insightful comparison of the act of reviewing in literature and the sciences.

Trained in the conventions of science specially that of Physics, much of my discomfort in  responding to or commenting on other subjects of interest may have stemmed from a feeling that these opinions were subjective; they could vary and there may not be a ‘truth’. In the act of writing a literary review with deliberation and in viewing my own response along with those of others, I have come to realise and start to accept that reviews that we pen whether in art or in science  may inevitably be a bit of our self.

[1] Phrase borrowed from “The Argumentative Indian” by Amartya Sen’s