The Hunger Games, Mockingjay and Catching Fire

An amazing trilogy by Suzanne Collins set in a post apocalyptic world where humans have been reduced to a single city state "The Capitol" and twelve slave "Districts". Capitols control over technology and more importantly communications lets it completely control the districts, going as far as to running an annual "hunger games". Hunger games are like The Survivor, but you die instead of just being voted out, and the players are picked from the children of the districts. The control of the Capitol is so complete that not only are districts forced to send their children to death year after year, but they are also forced to celebrate the games.

The premise of the book is horrifying, and as I started reading it I kept feeling that this is crazy, something like that can never happen. But in a surprisingly little time I found myself engrossed in the games, cheering some contestants, wishing death of others. On one hand, the book is clearly a work of fiction, there is no way something like that can ever happen in our world, but in other ways it hit close to home. One poignant scene is when a district child is in the capitol, and looks at a typical meal that is served - some meat, some cheese, some wine, some cake. He tallies in his head how long it will take someone to prepare a meal like that in his district. Hunt enough meat. Save enough meat so that you can trade some for cheese. A months salary for the wine. Probably 2 months worth of hunting to get enough money to trade for the cake. But that is not that far from the disparity in our world, just like that Hunger Games is a story of our world.

And that is the beauty of the books. Even with an outlandish setting far from anything that you can remotely identify with, they remain realistic and you cannot help getting emotionally involved with the characters. Even the people of the Capitol, you can almost feel some sympathy for them. They do horrible things, but they are as much a slave of the culture that they live in that it is really as heroic for them to stand against it, as it is for the people in the districts. For those who do not have the courage to fight, you can only be as unsympathetic for those in capitols as you are for those in the districts.

There were a few low spots, more like the nitpicking of a grouchy old man. I found the ending to be too fantastic even for the setting, and unsatisfying. The last book steadily climbs to a climax, and then in a style very reminiscent of Lord of The Rings, instead ending the story, says a slow good by to the reader rather than an abrupt adieu. While I loved the Lord of The Ring for that, here it just left me baffled. I thought it would have been better to have more narrative voices. You are on the edge of your seat wondering if your favorite character will live or die, and then you realize that the same character is narrating the story, so she must have lived though at least this scene.

Overall, highly recommended. All three books end with the closure of the plot, so you do not have to read the next one.

First Life: Discovering the Connections between Stars, Cells, and How Life Began

First off I have to admit that I approached this book as a lay person without any special background in Chemistry or Biology expecting to see something along the lines of a Brief History of Time.

Alas, First Life feels more like a thinly disguised text book and one that was written 20 years too early. First 150 or so pages just lay out the groundwork for the chemistry and are tedious to go through. The prose is like the boring history of magic teacher we all had in Hogwarts. Bunch of people discovering reactions, which to a lay person like me, seem very similar to each other. A big deal is made out of whether basic chemicals needed for life came from space or were synthesized on Earth, but "why" we care is not at all clear. From reading the text, it seems its pretty straightforward for them to be created on earth, and also pretty straightforward for them to be created in space, so lets just get on with the story shall we?

Another problem is that the final chapter of this story is still unwritten, which is why I say the book has been written 20 years too early. The book is basically the Author's proposal for how life started, you get very little context on how well his proposals are accepted by the broader community. The science itself far from approaching an answer, and so the proposal themselves are riddled with contradictions that a lay person like myself can hardly be expected to make sense of. For example, a bunch of necessary chemicals need acidic environment for synthesis, while another bunch of needed elements need alkaline conditions. Both of these chemicals are introduced at different points in the book, and the fact that they both need to appear together for life to start is glossed over.

Author keeps getting back to a piece of meteorite that he analyzed and a volcanic field in Russia that he visited. It gets old pretty quickly. There is only so much you can read about those two incidents. Also bugging are "more about this in Chapter X" where X is half a book away.

I am guessing people who have a background in Chemistry and Biology might find this book more interesting, its not really written for an average Joe.

Walstad Aquarium not doing so great

5 Gallon office aquarium is not doing so great. 10 new shrimps that I had added seemed to do well for a few weeks, but then one missed week of water change and they are all dead. I think Walstad aquariums are pretty picky on the type of soil that you use. Mine seemed to have a lot of organic matter, the water keeps turning yellow in about 3 days, and is really yellow in a week. I added a pair of Badis Badis which seem to be doing ok, but keeping my fingers crossed. It was a mistake to add shrimp first, since shrimp seem to be much more delicate than the Badis.

I need to change water every weekend otherwise it turns really yellow. Zero maintenance was the main draw of Walstad aquarium in office. I am still hoping that eventually all the soluble chemicals from the soil will leach out that the aquarium will settle down.

Office Aquarium Update

A quick update on office aquarium. Plants are growing like crazy. Every one of them looks healthy. Specially the floating duckweed and amazon frogbit. Of the 6 shrimp, at least one died. It's difficult to find them, so I am not sure how many are still alive, as far as I can tell, they have not bred. Snails have, lots of tiny snails and eggs all over. Also for the first time, I see tiny crustaceans in one of my aquariums. I need to get a good magnifying glass to figure out exactly which but it was very cool to see them darting around. I removed the filter media from the water filter, so it is now just used to provide water movement.

The biggest problem has been brown water. I have had to twice change about 60% of the water because it becomes so brown that almost no light reaches the bottom. Oxygen also seems to be a problem in this state and I see all the shrimp sitting on the surface of the water. I have also had H2S bubbles from substrate, but they seem few enough to not be worried about.

A list of plants in, before I forget them:

• Java Moss
• Subwassertang
• Cabomba
• Najas (Guppy Grass)
• Amazon Frogbit
• Duckweed
• Ludwigia
• Dwarf hairgrass
• Some sort of Amazon sword
• Spiral Valisnaria
• Some sort of chain sword
• Green Wendtii Crypt
• Java Fern
• Baby Tears (?)

Here are couple of pictures.

Top shot with duckweed and lots of floating plants

Side Shot showing the rooted plants. Floating plants are not very visible because of the glare from the light

India Calling: An Intimate Portrait of a Nation's Remaking

The best description for India Calling that I can think of is "Indians for Dummies", those three words describe both what is great about the book and what its limitations are. Its a great way to quickly learn about the India, its people, its customs and shared heritage, but always keeping in mind, that what you learn is only an approximation.

Indian emigre's usually are much more conservative than Indians back home. Their "Indian" values and customs stop evolving as soon as they leave India, so ironically enough when they go back to India, they usually find that Indians have progressed far while they still have a vision of India that is stuck in the past. Our author also suffers from this, since his version of India is from 1970's. His problems are compounded because his India of background in India was in the british influenced upperclass household that has as much in common with a average Indian as Paris Hilton with average American.

The book is basically a series of character portraits of a number of Indians. A long chapter on Ambani's seems out of place, it looks more like a piece for Vanity Fair rather than saying anything insightful about India. Moreover, that one chapter also undoes a major theme at the beginning of the book - that India in 1970's was a stifling place where to be successful you had to emigrate. Ambani's were contemporary of author's parents and brought up in much poorer circumstances, still they were able to reach epitome of success in India.

The most interesting parts of the books were little insights into Indian society, and a way of looking at them that I never did. The author is at his greatest when he talks about the individual and families, the "the family relations of guilt", "the vibration and madness that numbed one's sensitivity to oneself", "lightness of being without roots". At the other end of the spectrum, I thought he failed miserably when he tried to talk about the overarching conflicts and path of history and society. A section on Maoist insurgency is shallow, at times devolving into meaningless drivel you will expect in a liberal arts journal

"Just as the new self-confidence in India was nourishing a rediscovery of traditional ways, so, too, the individuation ushered in by modernity was, in fact, ..., a return to the past, to an older pattern of division known from the villages."

How any of it is relevant to realities of Maoist insurgency and mass killings is left to reader's imagination. Talking about corruption and Amabani's it seems that author was one of those "journalists covering the company were made part of the family". PR department of Reliance Industries could not have written a better profile of Mukesh Ambani.

For all the harsh words, I enjoyed reading the book. It broadens your horizons and shows you a different way of looking at things. Overall a pretty decent book.

Low Tech Office Aquarium

I recently read a book on aquarium ecology - Ecology of the Planted Aquarium by Diana Walstad. It's a pretty interesting book, filled with scientific tidbits, informative though more like scientific notes of a person, rather than a book. Anyway, the book review is for another day, whatever my cribs about it, its should be a definite read for anyone trying to keep planted aquariums or trying to recreate a system closer to natural aquatic world.

She proposes a "low-tech" aquarium, sans all the expensive equipment and specialized additives that I was familiar with. The idea intrigued me, the book convinced me that it could work, and Google search turned up various posts and pictures of the aquariums setup using her methods. To try it out, I decided to set up a 5 gallon aquarium for my office. She claims that an aquarium set up like this needs minimal maintenance - water change once in 6 months! Only regular maintenance required is plant pruning. Low maintenance works perfectly for an office aquarium.

Here is a great post on how to set up the aquarium with step by step pictures. My short setup:

1. 1 inch of potting soil, mixed with a handful of dolomite to neutralize the acidity. Crushed Oyster shells would have been better, as they are less reactive, but I could not find any at short notice.


2. Put a layer of small gravel along the edges about 1 inch think.


3. Plant as many plants as you can in the soil, put a layer of gravel around the stem.


4. After all the plants are in cover remaining open soil with gravel.


5. Slowly fill with water using a small bowl taking care not to stir up the gravel. If water is very cloudy siphon it out and refill.


6. Clamp on light fixture from hardware store and 23 watt full spectrum CFL bulb.


7. Bunch of floating plants, java moss etc.


8. 6 Red Cherry Shrimp.


9. A small submersible power filter - I used smallest that I could find, you do not really need a filter, just something to make the water move around, so a plain power head will do too.

Two days in, water is yellowish, from all the DOC (Dissolved Organic Carbon - read the book) from soil. One of the Shrimp has molted, may be two have. It's fun to try to find them while my code compiles. The experiment is on lets see how long the shrimp survive.

Callousness

Anand Giridharadas in India Calling on why its so easy to harden yourself to the misery around you

"The dependency scares you, as a needy lover's demands scare you, for it suggests a bottomless pit of giving that will devour you if you give in just slightly and allow yourself to care."