Vikram Chandra

I'm having trouble figuring out how to summarize this book, and I think that tells you something about the problems with it.

There is a lot of really fascinating information in here, but it doesn't really hold together. Chandra is trying to write about the relationship between programming and literature, specifically Sanskrit literature. In the first chapters, he talks about the world of computer programming, especially the machismo and racism that are built into today's programming culture. show more He sets up a straw man: some programmers talk about code as art.

The middle chapters of the book focus on Sanskrit literature. At first, the connection to programming seems clear: early Sanskrit grammarians wrote a set of rules that sound very much like coding algorithms, and some of the early coding languages took these ancient Sanskrit grammars into account when inventing their artificial languages. But then Chandra veers off into a discussion of Indian aesthetics. This is fascinating information, but it's really hard to tell where he's going with it.

Actually, here is where I think he was going with it: he needed to get this off his chest. He needed to explore it for his own development as an Indian-American writer. He needed to understand his Sanskrit roots, and how they manifest in his post-colonial literature. He wrote these chapters for himself, so that he could come to terms with his Indian past and how it fits into his American present.

But then, at the very end, he remembers that he has set out to write a book about programming, so he has a very brief chapter in which he argues that the theory of aesthetics does not apply to code, so code isn't art and that's the end of that.

I am glad I read this book. There is a lot of fascinating information in it. I myself am a programmer who took it up after years as an artist (musician and writer), and I have studied a lot of postcolonial literature, so the information in this book is right up my alley. Unfortunately, Chandra's argument really didn't have much coherence, and I feel like this was mostly a personal exploration for Chandra's own benefit. show less

Un bandito, un importante capobanda indiano, si racconta al poliziotto a cui ha scelto di consegnarsi, dopo una vita di delinquenza e violenza.
Ma siamo in India, e niente è semplice, perché il poliziotto, che pure è uno veramente onesto e appassionato al suo lavoro, prende bustarelle, e il bandito ha un guru (che poi si rivelerà il vero cattivo della storia) e lavora anche per i servizi segreti nazionali.
Una trama interessante che racconta molto di un enorme paese quasi del tutto show more sconosciuto.
Due appunti, uno all'autore e uno al traduttore.
Per l'autore: il libro è sterminato, e molte delle storie accessorie non aggiungono nulla alla comprensione della storia principale, servono solo ad aggiungere pagine, non fascino alla lettura.
Per il traduttore: la scelta di lasciare nella lingua originale tutti i termini volgari è veramente sciocca, nessuno, credo, sarebbe rimasto sconvolto a leggere scopare (o termini gergali simili) piuttosto che "chodare", tanto per fare un esempio, e questa scelta riesce solo a innervosire il lettore, senza peraltro aggiungere nulla all'atmosfera esotica del romanzo. show less

I am a computer programmer... I have designed and built computer circuit - LS7400 and wire-wrap! - written simple operating systems, I/O device drivers, and lots of application code. Half of Chandra's book is about hardware and software technology. It was well written and pulls in tasty morsels - e.g. a nice story of programming on a machine with drum storage, and using placement of instructions on the drum to introduce desired delay - so I was never bored or felt like skipping anything.

I am show more also a student of Indian philosophy. Chandra here dives into the rasa aesthetic theory of Abhinavagupta. I have heard a bit about that before but never in any depth at all. Chandra sketches out the basics very nicely. I felt like I really learned something.

I'm not exactly sure how these two parts of the book were intended to fit together. Certainly it was a delight to learn about Panini's grammar and how that has given Sanskrit a formal structure and a kind of timeless quality. But then the rasa theory shows how meaning is not really so timeless, since it depends on resonance with memories of the reader.

I think the idea is to contrast this time-dependent quality of literature with the mechanical timelessness of software. But really most software is hardly self-contained at all It's shot through with interfaces to other packages and services. That's a lot of why software needs to be maintained, because the other systems it's connected to are always changing. The meaning of software is also quite time-dependent! Or maybe that was Chandra's point and I just missed it? Or maybe, rasa-style, he just suggested it so it feels like I figured it out for myself? Not impossible!

The book felt like a short little wade on the edge of a vast ocean, maybe like in South Africa, where the Indian and Atlantic Oceans meet. show less

A while back, I read Vikram Chandra’s debut novel Red Earth and Pouring Rain, and loved it – it was everything Magical Realism always promises to be but so rarely really is – it combines a rich, sensual writing that lets the reader soak in the sights, sound and smells of a vivdly evoked reality with a fertile, proliferating imagination that transforms that reality into something even richer and stranger but which still gives us a perspective on our world as it is – distorts it into show more clarity, to appropriate a famous phrase from Bertolt Brecht.

Love and Longing in Bombay is a collection of five stories, and it is quite different in tone from the novel, in so far as for the most part it sticks with traditional realism… or at least appears to. To me at least, there seemed to be a certain amount of litary pastiche involved, in so far as each of the stories is framed, placed in a setting where it is told verbally by a narrator to an audience, in a manner that I found very reminiscent of Joseph Conrad’s Marlow (or possibly the short fiction of Rudyard Kipling, who was also rather fond of that narrative device).

Each of the stories is named after a concept taken from Hinduistic philosophy - of which I have to confess that I do not have the first clue. I had to look the terms up in Wikipedia, but even at such a superficial level, having some idea what the concepts mean does shed some additional light on the individual stories. Both the narrative frame and the titles offer a perspective on the stories from the outside looking in, some rudimentary explanation or interpretetation, and both seem to presuppose that the stories are an illustration of some larger concept, or an example for a truth about life. Rather interestingly though, they never are the same, whilte the narrator Mr. Subramaniam always offers the stories to illustrate some point, that point never seems to stand in any correlation to the title the author gave the stories - the perspectives intersect, but are not identical.

The final story in the collection, though, is markedly different from the others: its title refers not just to a concept, but also to a name, and it is only one in which the narrator himself, Mr. Subramaniam, plays an active part. As if that was not enough to raise it to a meta-lavel, its plot also mainly consists of its two protagonists telling each other stories (which are given inside the story, but never as told by their original narrator, always passed on through an intermediary). This story strays quite far from the realism of the others, and I very much doubt it is coincidence that it is also the only one that (for the most part) does not take place in Bombay – making it appear as if Bombay was the gravitational centre of realism – or even reality – in India, with things becoming increasingly more fantastic the farther one moves away from it. show less